He Debuted as a Master

Lost in the City stories by Edward P. Jones.  Amisted.  243 pp. $15.99.  *****

There was a time when I read book reviews the way, as a kid, I used to read the sports pages.  At my house we got the Sunday New York Times and Saturday Review, also the New Yorker.  It wasn’t as if I read all the books I read reviews of [1], or anything close to that, but I kept up with things.  I knew who the writers were.

After I published my first novel in 1980, I began reviewing books for a variety of newspapers, including the New York Times and Washington Post, and I belonged to the National Book Critics Circle, attending the yearly meeting (a room full of book reviewers.  Not exactly a raucous hard-partying group).  For about a decade I kept track of things, following reviews in the Times and Post, also USA Today, where I had started to review (and which had an excellent book page, edited by a man who had previously been at the Post), but eventually I drifted away from that world and reviewed books only sporadically.  As I got older, I didn’t want some book page editor telling me what to read.  I wanted to decide myself.

I also have a prejudice toward the writers of my generation and older.  It’s not that I don’t read anybody young, but as I’ve gotten older I’ve tended to read writers who are at least my rough contemporaries, including some standard authors I’d missed out on.  I’ve become a great fan of the Library of America.

All this is to explain how, when I read that Edward P. Jones was the highest ranked American author in the recent New York Times list of the best 100 books of the century[2], I was stunned to admit I’d never heard of him.  He is from my generation.  Just two years younger than I.

The book in question is a novel, The Known World.  Jones also cracked the top hundred with a book of stories, All Aunt Hagar’s Children, and when I heard that he had written only three books in total, and that his newer book of stories concerned minor characters from the first one, I decided to start with Lost in the City.

Jones published it in 1992, when he was 42, and if the acknowledgements are accurate, only three of the stories had previously been published.  I don’t know what had sustained his spirit all those years, or how he had made a living, but the man is a masterful story writer.

His little postage stamp of soil, at least for the short stories, is the Washington DC of his youth.  His stories traverse the city and a wide range of ages; he mentions in his Introduction that he has arranged his stories according to the chronological age of the characters—something I wouldn’t have noticed otherwise—and insisted on that ordering, even when his publisher resisted.  The man seems to know what he wants.  There is everything here from a little girl going to his first day of school to an 86-year-old woman dealing with muggers in the city and—worse that that—the Social Security Administration.  Jones is as comfortable writing about women as men, about well-off people and the dirt poor.  There seems to be nothing his imagination can’t accommodate.

Toni Morrison famously said that she was writing a different kind of black literature, one that didn’t explain blacks to white people (she saw a lot of that in earlier black fiction) but portrayed black people’s lives for themselves, without apology.  Jones, I would say, does the same thing, and while Morrison’s work has something his doesn’t—a mythical, poetic element—I almost appreciate these stories more, because they give us life as it is lived.  That’s what I love to read.

Take a story like “His Mother’s House.”  When Santiago Moses buys his mother the kind of modern, convenient, newly furnished house she had never dreamed of, she hardly knows how to use everything, or occupy the space.  When one of his friends named Humphrey shows up one day to pay Santiago money that he owes him, the man pulls out a huge wad of bills, and Joyce doesn’t want to handle it.  She doesn’t like to mix in her son’s business (but when she mentions to Santiago that Humphrey is there, he says to make sure he doesn’t leave; Santiago wants to talk to him.  Unfortunately, Humphrey and his wad of bills disappear before morning).

Joyce’s boyfriend Rickey also works for Santiago, as a driver and bodyguard.  It is only gradually that we realize how Santiago is making his vast fortune, and that he and Humphrey, are the children of two women who were best friends years ago and moved in together when they were pregnant so they could share expenses.  The two women remain best friends in the present.  The violent end of the story, which we can see coming, and which completely changes everything—does not seem melodramatic when it happens.  It seems inevitable.  The things that we read about in the papers have a human story behind them.

These stories aren’t about one kind of person or one kind of life.  One is about a young man who works in a local grocery store, and a tragic accident that changes everything about the owner’s life; another is about a group of gospel singers on the day when one is betrayed by one of the others, a lifelong friend; the title story is about a successful businesswoman who is sleeping with a man whose name she can’t quite remember on the night when she hears that her mother died, and she needs to go to the hospital; she can’t face the taxi ride downtown without a few lines of cocaine, then can’t face it at all, telling the driver just to drive around, get lost in the city.  She can’t face her past, or the fact of death itself.  She’s not alone in that.

There isn’t a weak story in the book, and many are deeply affecting.  Like Lauren Groff more recently, Edward P. Jones debuted as a master.  I only wish he had written more than three books.  But maybe there are more coming.

[1] The only person I knew who might have done that was Jay Dantry, the owner of Jay’s Bookstall in Pittsburgh, where I often shopped and briefly, one summer, worked.  Jay was an extremely rapid reader, and when a new book came in he took it home, read it in one evening, then brought it back and put it on his shelves.  When we were buying books there, we often asked Jay if he had read that title.  He never said no.  My brother Bill later pointed out, though, that when you bought a book at Jay’s you might have been buying a used copy.  One person had taken it home and read it.

[2] The whole enjoyment of such a list is in disagreeing with it.  And despite saying that I don’t keep up with current literature, I’ve read six of the top ten.  And I loved Elena Ferrante’s novels, all of them, but we’re saying My Brilliant Friend is the best book of the century?  Really?  Probably I would have objected to any book they picked, but that was a bit of a puzzler.