Buy or borrow this book! Support your local independent bookseller
Find it in a WorldCat library
Compare prices at major online bookstores
|
|
In school, I learned that good fiction is dependent on the quality of the voice, the skill of the writer to compose sentences that tell the story beneath the story, that tell something of the character speaking.
In Live at Five, David Haynes has such a voice. It is a black voice of the nineties, of African Americans with a particular dialect of English, a dialect you might hear in a project or downtown.
The novel is a story full of humor about shades of color, of distinction--about the difference, really, between what it is to be "black" and what it is to be middle-class "African American." The hero is Brandon Wilson, anchor of a 5 p.m. newscast in Minneapolis. His ratings aren't what they should be, so Brandon's white boss gives him an idea: Go into the hood and broadcast from there.
What Brandon encounters in the hood is shocking for him, funny for us. He finds people like you and me: people whose lives are important to them, people who work jobs, who have kids, who have the occasional scheme to get ahead--people whose lives have little aim beyond getting to the end of the day, every day.
He meets a young woman named Nita. She has three young kids, a solid job, a goal, and an attitude. An initial attraction between the two turns into confrontation as Brandon's media circus takes over.
Brandon's inability to understand Nita reflects the gap between his middle-class persona and the 'real-world blackness" of the inner city neighborhood he tries to capture on TV. These are people he can't really understand because the language they speak isn't the one he speaks. Theirs has an edge, a kind of direct ferocity. His is, well, whiter than that.
While he understands what it is to be African American, he's never really considered what it is to be black. Understanding that is Brandon's mission. The author infuses the whole exploit with a great sense of humor about class, color, and our obsession with TV.
Live At Five isn't going to change the world, literary or otherwise. What makes it worth picking up is a solid voice that provides a revealing--and entertaining--look at a slice of American social life.
Tony Buchsbaum is a writer living in Princeton, New Jersey.
©1996, ProMotion, inc.