Leon Forrest (1937–1997)

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From the Publisher
Fabulous, wildly comic, and Ulysses-like, Divine Days explores the mythical world of Leon Forrest's literary kingdom, Forest County. It is a huge oratorio of the sacred and the profane, set in bars, churches, and barbershops over a crucial seven-day period in the life of would-be playwright Joubert Jones during February 1966. Divine Days creates a profound microcosm of African-American life. It is the most prodigious literary creation since Ellison's Invisible Man forty years ago. Joubert Jones - playwright, journalist, bartender, lover - confronts and transcends the power of a fantastic group of bar denizens whose personalities run the gamut of classical myths, Shakespearean heros, Shakespearean villains, religious true-believers, and ghetto dwellers. Joubert is evolving a memory from the yeasty material of his friend and mentor Sugar-Groove into a play. Sugar-Groove is a world traveler, a mythical lover, who has twenty nicknames connected with his prowess. He is trickster-as-angel. Joubert's volatile and fragile girlfriend, Imani, is desperately searching for her abandoned siblings, a meaningful self-definition of her Blackness, and a place to settle her warring spirit. Joubert also encounters the powerful presence of his Aunt Eloise and the ever-haunting phantasmagoric W. A. D. Ford, the demonic trickster and manipulator of bodies and souls. Ford is the Mephistopheles of Forest County, and he comes to represent the forces of cosmic evil in the world. The neighborhood of Joubert's imagination becomes a theater enraptured with the voices of the living and the dead, acted out in Aunt Eloise's Night Light Lounge. The critic John Cawelti has called this novel: "the Ulysses of the South Side." In the tradition of Joyce's Dedalus, Ellison's invisible narrator, Bellow's Augie March, and Heller's Yossarian, Joubert's voice emerges clearly upon Divine Days's ebullient stage.

From The Critics
Publishers Weekly
With enormous energy and an uncanny range of oral styles--from high-flown preaching to down-and-dirty slang--this remarkable fourth novel by Forrest ( Two Wings to Veil My Face ) takes more than 1100 pages to recount one week in the life of Joubert Jones, an aspiring playwright who has just returned to his home on Chicago's South Side after two years in the Army. Much of Jones's time is spent with the ``zany denizens'' of his Aunt Eloise's Night Light Lounge--a spectrum of humanity that includes drunkards, mystics, policemen and other spinners of tall tales--which was once the location for ``Divine Days,'' the religious revival house of con man and preacher W.A.D. Ford. ``Hypersensitively attuned to the sound of voices, babblings, other-worldlysic and worldly tongues,'' Jones has written a play about Ford's ``mysterious ritual services'' and is now bent on chronicling the memory of his older friend Sugar-Groove, a traveling raconteur whose earthy adventures, told to a young Jones, masked a different kind of spirituality than that suggested by Ford. The novel is meant to be a ``long-tongue saga'' touching on every aspect of African American life in the mid-1960s. In presenting life's ``connective patterns'' primarily through speeches, Forrest's work is more reminiscent of Henry Miller's obsessive narratives and Toni Morrison's mythic languages than James Joyce's internal explorations. Yet what ultimately allows Forrest to sustain a reader's interest throughout is his determination not only to show a range of oral styles, but to allow each and every character to demonstrate a sophisticated ease with all of these styles, using African American language and subject matter ``to create a synthesis out of all nightmares that our experiences kept throwing up at us.'' This is dazzling, dizzying, demanding and highly recommended. (June) .

Martin Brady - Chicago Sun-Times
A work of range and scope, power and beauty. It arrives trumpeted as the black Ulysses and so it is…featuring a cast of characters truly Joycean in their larger—than—life proportions.

Arnold Rampersad
Almost every page of Divine Days offers abundant evidence that Leon Forrest is a writer of virtuosity and power….A landmark in the artistic representation of social and historical reality, a rich and complex entertainment that deserves our praise, respect, and gratitude.
New York Newsday

What People Are Saying
Brooding, hilarious, acerbic, and profoundly valued life has no more astute observer than Leon Forrest.

- Toni Morrison
The War and Peace of the African—American novel.… (altro)