Rails Under My Back: A Novel, by Jeffery Renard Allen
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Rails Under My Back: A Novel, by Jeffery Renard Allen
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"Will put Allen in the company of writers such as James Joyce, August Wilson, and Ralph Ellison." ―The Philadelphia InquirerWhen it was first published fifteen years ago, Jeffery Renard Allen's debut novel, Rails Under My Back, earned its author comparisons to some of the giants of twentieth-century modernism. The publication of Allen's equally ambitious second novel, Song of the Shank, cemented those lofty claims. Now, the book that established his reputation is being restored to print in its first Graywolf Press edition. Together, the two novels stand as significant achievements of twenty-first-century literature. Rails Under My Back is an epic that tracks the interwoven lives of two brothers, Lucius and John Jones, who are married to two sisters, Gracie and Sheila McShan. For them, their parents, and their children, life is always full of departures; someone is always fleeing town and leaving the remaining family to suffer the often dramatic, sometimes tragic consequences. The multiple effects of the comings and goings are devastating: These are the almost mythic expression of the African American experience in the half century that followed the Second World War. The story ranges, as the characters do, from the city, which is somewhat like both New York and Chicago, to Memphis, to the West, and to many "inner" and "outer" locales. Rails Under My Back is a multifaceted, brilliantly colored, intensely musical novel that pulses with urgency and originality.
Rails Under My Back: A Novel, by Jeffery Renard Allen- Amazon Sales Rank: #2539498 in Books
- Published on: 2015-10-20
- Released on: 2015-10-20
- Original language: English
- Number of items: 1
- Dimensions: 9.08" h x 1.24" w x 6.07" l, 1.00 pounds
- Binding: Paperback
- 576 pages
From Publishers Weekly The charged metaphor of the railroad serves as the spine of this vigorous and imaginative debut, an epic novel chronicling the lives and loves of two brothers, Lucifer and John Jones, and their wives, sisters Gracie and Sheila McShan. Nearly eight years in the writing, Allen's complex, ambitious story of an extended African-American family examines the emotional and spiritual costs of progress and change as the two men grapple with the choices and responsibilities of marriage and parenting. Theirs is a clan always on the move between a big city that's a hybrid of New York and Chicago, Memphis and the West, and the departures and arrivals affect the stability of all, either strengthening the familial bonds or causing chaos and pain. The personalities of the two patriarchs, level-headed Lucifer and restless John, dominate the lengthy, sometimes perplexing narrative. Though different in temperament, the brothers are inseparable, sharing a small flat with their wives at the start of their marriages, celebrating their wedding anniversaries together. Allen tells their stories as well as those of their children, Portia, Hatch and Jesus, in a rapid series of episodes, often recalled in a nonlinear style from different vantage points. The vignettes tell of Sheila and Gracie's upbringing by their kind aunt, Miss Beulah, after they are abandoned by their mother; Lucifer's courtship of Sheila; the brothers' experiences in an unspecified war; the deaths of two of John and Gracie's babies; John's abuse and abandonment of his wife; and Jesus' brutal arrest after a violent confrontation with the family. Allen's multilayered exploration of the themes of abandonment, survival, love, emotional irresponsibility and redemption is original, but his dense, challenging fictional style, intermingling myth, cultural folklore and vernacular language, demands the reader's unflagging attention. For those who stay the course, however, the wondrous journey is rewarding. (Jan.) Copyright 1999 Reed Business Information, Inc.
From Library Journal Although not completely successful from a narrative standpoint, Allen's first novel is a literary tour de force--a raw, powerful, and often poetic evocation of the modern, urban African American experience and the themes of family and abandonment. Told in alternating voices, this complex tale spans both generations and locales, relating the comings and goings of the McShans and the ties that bind them, with everything linked by a winding railroad metaphor. The story centers on the sons of two brothers married to two sisters whose roots are in the rural South. Hatch is a musician and dreamer, Jesus a wanna-be gangsta whose ambitions demand the assassination of his own father as payback for a ripoff. Not for the timid or the politically correct, this book offers language as blunt and realistic as its characterizations. Not likely to be a "popular" book, it is nonetheless an important one, giving a new voice to the African American experience. For all academic and all but the smallest public libraries.-David W. Henderson, Eckerd Coll. Lib., St. Petersburg, FL Copyright 1999 Reed Business Information, Inc.
From Kirkus Reviews A powerful first novel that uses the railroad as a complex metaphorof hopeful reunion but also of separation and dispersalin telling the multi-generational stories of two closely related black American families. Brothers John and Lucius (``Lucifer'') Jones marry sisters Gracie and Sheila McShan, and both couples settle in an unnamed fictional big city that's an imaginative amalgam of New York and Chicago. In a vigorous, jazzy, stop-and-start style that deftly mixes crisp declarative sentences with fragmented dialogue and vigorous expostulations (and that intercuts present and past scenes with brief spasmodic flashbacks), Allen dramatizes both the sources (their families' histories) and the consequences (their children's fates) of the separate paths the Jones brothers follow (``Lucifer and John, brothers in the skin, but no closeness''). The novel both begins and comes to a climax with the streetwise ``business'' that engulfs Gracie and John's embittered teenaged son Jesus, whose temperament contrasts (as do his father's and uncle's) revealingly with that of his cousin Hatch, a soulful youngster bent on becoming a blues musician. The bulk of the story stretches forward and backward (often without helpful transitions, but always bursting quickly into vivid clarity) to focus on various members of the two families' several generations. Most compelling are: stern matriarch Lulu Mae McShan; hardworking, stoical Sheila and religion-bound Gracie; Sheila's daughter ``Porsha'' (Portia), who seeks escape from the city's snares and delusions in a commercial world of ``beauty'' and in her headlong affair with a handsome stud significantly nicknamed ``Deathrow''; and the flickering figure of John Jones, a troubled Vietnam vet and wanderer who cannot remain faithful to his wife or their kinwith devastating results memorably shown in a long, harrowing denouement. An exciting and rewarding successor to the legacy of James Baldwin and Ralph Ellison. Allen worked eight years on this novel, and the result is a very impressive creation: the work of an unusually gifted, disciplined, and more than promising writer. -- Copyright ©1999, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.
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10 of 10 people found the following review helpful. A Remarkable First Novel By Stephen Smith Jr. This novel is a wonderful story told by the members of an extraordinary family. Each one of these characters are expertly fleshed out by Allen, who portrays a closely knit family of incredibly diverse personalities. Allen tells the story using snippets of perspective from each family member, so reading the story is like piecing a puzzle together, like reading the best of Faulkner. I haven't been so engrossed in the story of a family since I read Wolfe's "Look Homeward Angel". Incidentally, these two books also have a common theme: that you can look back on where you've been, but you can never go back, and home is only where you happen to be today.
9 of 9 people found the following review helpful. "Rails" Follows the Tracks of Two Families" By Judy Lightfoot ...Jeffery Renard Allen's first novel presents the interwoven narratives of two extended families whose histories go back past the Great Migration to the middle of the nineteenth century. "Rails Under My Back" is partly autobiographical, but it is blessedly free of the personal grievances so typical of confessional writing. And though the subject of race figures naturally in the book, it differs from protest novels like Richard Wright's and from celebrations of African American life like Zora Neale Hurston's, in that it is driven by no particular racial agenda. Allen's themes are the ordinary mysteries of human beings anywhere: the fitful dynamics between generations, the various effects of minor events on different members of the same family, and the uniqueness of every human life, unfolding with its particular and unpredictable logic.Twenty years ago the McShan sisters married the Jones brothers, conjoining two long-lived clans and establishing their homes in a Midwestern city rather like modern Chicago. Their teenaged children - - Hatch, the son of Sheila and Lucifer, and Jesus, son of Gracie and John - - were inseparable while growing up, but now they've drifted apart. Hatch, a voracious reader, wants a career in music; Jesus, smoldering with rages he doesn't wholly understand, gravitates toward gang life in the inner-city projects. As the narrative opens, 17-year-old Jesus is coming home only rarely, intimidating his relatives (including Hatch) with his iron eyes, bulletlike shaved head, and surly silences.How did two boys so close in age, blood, and background turn out so differently? In Allen's book this question, explicitly the center of John Edgar Wideman's fine "Brothers and Keepers," is merely implied. But it offers a plot that's taut as well as subtle, in vectors of simultaneous construction and destruction. By acts of violence Jesus seeks to tear the family apart, even as Hatch and his sister Porsha, a successful model who has fallen in love with an inner-city hoodlum, try to connect their lives with family history. At times the characters experience personal bonds as bondage, and separation from loved ones feels a lot like freedom. Will Jesus break every tie of kinship and affection? Will Hatch follow Jesus into an urban wilderness?Social criticism is implied in scenes from the city projects--the rust-bucket elevators, urinous halls, disintegrating families, paralyzing oscillations between random violence and inertia--and in the baffled, dead-end fates of Black men who helped fight their nation's wars. But no rancors lie behind these themes. There's no piousness, either, in the book's focus on people who daily, endlessly do menial jobs in order to maintain decent lives. Allen's characters have simply inherited a remarkable capacity for work from ancestors like Pappa Simmons, who said, "Labor is the deck. All else is the sea.""Rails" is a long book. Though its recurrent railway journeys create a poetic coherence, they can be so dizzy we lose any sense of direction. Events sometimes merge confusingly, and a few plot threads are left dangling. Occasionally the prose reads like fragments shored against someone's ruin - - scraps of nursery rhyme, rap song, and jump-rope chant are juxtaposed with marginalia in family albums, an FBI clipping, an NAACP notice safety-pinned into a book, a funeral program. Maybe the unsigned letter found in a family Bible speaks for this novel's author: "It should be easy to follow the thread of my story� The seams show." But even fans of postmodern pastiche will sometimes need to ask of Allen's book (as Porsha asks of the letter), "How am I sposed to read this?"Still, Allen's characters, including his remarkable women, are uniquely imagined. His portrayals of married life are fresh and intelligent: the helpless love between Lucifer and Sheila gives neither a window on the other's surprising inner world, while Gracie, strangely tormented by the ghosts of babies, struggles to accept John's bad case of the walking blues. Porsha's work in photography studios is fascinating. Young men in the projects talk amazing trash, part horrifying menace and part comic bluster. Cityscapes unfold like prose-poems, flashbacks to stories of Whole Daddy and Pappa Simmons are marvelous, and the book has intriguing religio-mythic dimensions - - the names of Jesus and Lucifer are no accident.Readers who love the works of Ellison, Morrison, and Faulkner will welcome Allen's book. In an era when marketability reigns, we should thank his publishers, too, for backing a first novel this challenging, ambitious, and seriously literary.
13 of 15 people found the following review helpful. A bumpy ride... By mateo52 Here is a newer author who has demonstrated his voice is one that will be discernible in the overpopulated choir of modern writers. I just hope I get some clue as to what he is attempting to convey. I read the book slowly and carefully, very slowly and very carefully. I made copious use of the genealogical chart... as if I had a choice. Similarity in names among members of the extended family impeded my progress at several junctures. I tried to defer a final opinion until I had taken the time to re-evaluate, however the end result remained unchanged, confusion, with frustration a photo-finish second.Without question, Jeffery Renard Allen is an up and coming wordsmith. He has the capability to evoke imagery of crystal clarity yet I found myself in a state of flux as to why I had been suddenly transported to a new time, place or generation. As far as I could tell and believe me, I read page by page, RAILS UNDER MY BACK is at its core the story of the interdependency, aspirations, and failures of two doubly-bound families (brothers married to sisters) in a large northern city, some contrived amalgam of New York and Chicago. In all things relevant the rail system which I saw as a metaphor of family ties, was the instrument of definitive influence. The train/subway/elevated are equally a method of escape and the locus of security.The book, set primarily in the 1970s, flows seamlessly from city to city, generation to generation, reality to surreal, and that in fact is one of the problems. Give me at a subtle clue we are moving on. I am not inferring the transitions were haphazard in placement but they were not effectively introduced nor conducive to the reader's enjoyment.RAILS is not oppressively long but it is a challenge to read. Regrettably, the end of the trip does not justify the rigors of the journey.
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