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Overview
It has been fourteen years since Irvin Faust's last novel, and Jim Dandy is well worth the wait. Once again Faust displays his dazzling talent for reimagining history, his uncanny ear for dialogue, and his ability to realize marvelous characters. Jim Dandy is Hollis Cleveland: smart, resourceful, tough-minded, handsome, a man who seems to have all the gifts and talent to take him anywhere he wants to go. But Hollis Cleveland is black, the year is 1936, and his options are, as he would say, limited. So he becomes a successful numbers runner until he double-crosses the man who controls Harlem. That casually made decision brings extremely fateful consequences, chief among them the flight for safety and his life. His escape plunges him into some of the most notable events of that watershed year. For in 1936 America is still in depression; in Europe, British and French fascism is bubbling up alongside the Nazi model; in Spain the world is taking sides in a deadly civil conflict; and in Africa Mussolini is making his grab for Ethiopia. Much of this turmoil ensnares Cleveland-Dandy, but none so deeply or violently as the Italo-Ethiopian war. His odyssey in Africa, accompanied by a soldier-of-fortune known as Ace, is a brilliant evocation of abiding questions and moral choices about race, national interest, loyalty, and good and evil that are as primary today as they were almost sixty years ago. When he returns to America, Cleveland-Dandy must again choose which way to go - and he does this in a shattering conclusion. The many voices of this brilliantly rendered novel speak warningly to us today. Meticulously researched, beautifully written, Jim Dandy is a fascinating story of a complicated man's struggle to find out who and what he is in a world that is spinning out of control.Editorials
Publishers Weekly -
When, in 1936, African American Harlem numbers-runner Hollis Cleveland double-crosses his wisecracking, cigar-chomping Jewish boss, he knows he's in trouble. So he assumes the alias of ``Jim Dandy'' (the name of a minstrel-show character he played as a boy in South Carolina) and absconds to Ethiopia to join the fight against Mussolini's invading troops. Faust's ( Willy Remembers ) first novel in 14 years is an engrossing, complex exploration of race relations, politics and the search for identity. Though a Canadian war correspondent dubs Hollis ``a sepia Lawrence of Arabia,'' and though Emperor Haile Selassie begs him to continue his brave exploits, Hollis feels a racial divide between himself and the Ethiopians, who maintain that they ``are not Negro.'' Faust has an unerring ear for dialogue and creates memorable characters, such as as African American pilot Maximilian Joseph, a former U.S. Army Air Corps general turned soldier of fortune who flies Hollis around Africa, and Sir Henry Armitage, a wealthy English protofascist crackpot who mistakes Hollis for an Ethiopian prince. Faust interpolates jazzy riffs on colonialism, race and history, and closes symbolically with Hollis, back in New York in 1938, deciding his next move even as heavyweight champ Joe Louis, the ``Brown Bomber,'' knocks out ``beetle-browed Hun'' Max Schmeling. (June)Library Journal
We first meet Hollis Cleveland, a.k.a. Jim Dandy, dancing in his father's minstrel revue in 1915. Fast forward to 1936, and the grown Cleveland is still in show business, college educated, fluent in four foreign languages, and on the run from his boss in a Harlem numbers-running organization. His flight takes him overseas, where he plunges into the turbulent atmosphere of rising fascism, the Spanish Civil War, and Mussolini's attempted grab of Ethiopia. Cleveland's sojourn in Africa and his return to the United States bring up troubling questions of nationalism, race, and identity. This novel of international intrigue by the author of Newsreel (1980) is a historical thriller set in one of the most volatile eras in the 20th century and features the most urbane hero this side of James Bond. Recommended for most fiction collections.-Dan Bogey, Clearfield Cty. P.L. Federation, Curwensville, Pa.Book Details
Published
June 1, 1994
Publisher
Carroll & Graf Pub
Pages
304
Format
Hardcover
ISBN
9780786700622