Too-Brief Looks at Books That Deserve Your Attention

I was going through the piles of books around my desk yesterday afternoon, and I came across a few trade paperbacks from Harlem Moon, the African-American imprint at Broadway Books, that reprint some early 20th-century classics. The Heart of Happy Hollow, a collection of short stories by Paul Laurence Dunbar, didn't especially hold my attention--but it wasn't the fault of his extensive use of dialect; I just don't happen to find a lot of late-19th- or early-20th-century American short fiction as engaging as I do more modern stories. Likewise, the opening pages of W.E.B. DuBois's first novel, The Quest of the Silver Fleece, seemed a little slow and archaic to my contemporary sensibilities, though pretty good for the period (again, by my casual reckoning which has huge gaps because this era has not been of major interest to me as far as American fiction is concerned). But it was The Colonel's Dream, by Charles W. Chesnutt, that really held my attention. Although it actually predates the DuBois by half a decade, the prose is more "modern" in the sense of a certain liveliness, and Chesnutt's command of character is damn strong. You wouldn't confuse this with a late-20th-century novel, but its robustness puts it at least a few years ahead of its time. I happen to find a lot of Ishmael Reed's introduction sloppy--not as bad as his James Brown review last weekend, but still pretty awful in spots--but Reed might well be on to something when he identifies Chesnutt as "a major American writer, who, had he been white, would have been canonized long before now."