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BOOK REVIEW   BOND

notes Fess's intellectual prowess), albeit confused, attempt to address the problems of his people as deriving essentially from an oversized inferiority complex and protracted white woman craziness, is most regrettable. The point that Black Nationalist motivation can, in certain instances, be said to include such psychological complications as afflict Fess would be entirely palatable in a different context from the one Miss Hunter constructs. What offends her is the juxtaposition of Fess's incorrigibility with Louretta's virtue-read: Fess's blackness with Louretta's whiteness. 

The ending, too, is sticky. Having made their debut at a friend's funeral, the young singers are "discovered," recorded, marketed and -guess what? They're a smash. The money rolls in; Louretta assumes a new air of confidence; the boys acquire fetishes. One gets a red motor scooter; another becomes a gourmet, treating himself et al. to sumptuous spreads at continental restaurants around town. As for Fess: "From an ardent revolutionary he had become an enthusiastic booster of business, free enterprise and capitalism." Only Frank "wanted to use his earnings to buy guns for a revolution;" but even he eventually "went downtown and bought a red motor scooter exactly like David's." Lou's intoxication with the new action is brief. Soon, she realizes the inner cost exacted for celebrity status; loss of interest in school, restlessness...and still no real friends. She pines for her lost childhood spent in the nooks and crannies of the ghetto, but it is lost forever. Now the trouble with these developments is not that they are implausible, or even that they amount to a black version of the standard wrap-up one finds in novels for teen-age girls (remember all of those apple-cheeked heroines caught unawares by the onrushing twilight of adolescence?). The trouble is that there is something vaguely unethical about the author's bringing her story to an end in this way. She has indulged a whim, born of her jaded perspective-jaded because it is older, disappointed and a mite contemptuous of the antics that pass for Human Endeavor on this mortal coil. The climax reads like an adult "in" joke, the irony and pathos of which might be obscure for a young Harlemite. After all, jiving at a record studio, taking in more bread than you know what do with- isn't that what's generally thought to be a groove? And if it isn't, why not? Doubtless, it is worthwhile to advance the concept of the all-pervasive, all-corrosive society which reduces to dross everything it touches. But persuading a youngster whose world consists of seven blocks on the wrong side of town that lights will go out in his life if he becomes an "Insider" (Lou's term) would take

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---------- Reopened for Editing 2024-02-15 15:58:22