IF HE HOLLERS LET HIM GOBy Chester...

IF HE HOLLERS LET HIM GO

By Chester Himes

Thunder’s Mouth Press:

204 pp., $13.95

“If He Hollers Let Him Go” was first published in 1945 when Chester Himes was 36, and its reissue today is a cause for celebration. It is a relentless, gripping, classic novel, one of the most powerful exposes of what it is like to be black in America. Bob Jones, a well-educated shipyard worker in Los Angeles, is on his way up. He’s put in a leadership position at work, and his girlfriend is a light-skinned black supervisor in the Los Angeles Department of Social Welfare. He owns a car. But everywhere he turns there is racism; his days are carpeted with discrimination, and his rage is building to a boiling point.

When a woman from Texas is asked to work in his group and says she won’t work for a “nigger,” Jones calls her a “cracker” and is instantly demoted. Realizing how little control he has over his own life, he becomes more and more afraid. He sees the Japanese being carried off to camps. He hears endless talk about communism, about the relationship between race and class, but in his mind, the roots of racism reach back beyond class and into sexuality.

“But now I was scared in a different way,” Jones thinks after the Texan woman, whom he has rejected, has wrongfully accused him of rape. “Not of the violence. Not of the mob. Not of the physical hurt. But of America, of American justice .... The whole structure of American thought was against me; American tradition had convicted me a hundred years before.”

Jones’ girlfriend, Alice, buffered by money, begs him not to be beaten by race, to “adjust himself to the limits of his race.” But the world of the shipyard is different from the comfortable world that Alice lives in. Jones’ fear and his fury bleed through the pages. No reader, even now, 57 years later, of any color, gender or economic class, is immune.

*

THE HOUSE ON ECCLES ROAD

By Judith Kitchen

Graywolf: 226 pp., $22

It worked for Michael Cunningham, whose novel “The Hours,” based on “Mrs. Dalloway” by Virginia Woolf, is still a hit five years after it was published. But Judith Kitchen has chosen an even more difficult mold: “Ulysses” by James Joyce. “The House on Eccles Road” takes place on June 16, sometime in the present. Leo Bluhm is an English professor. His wife, Molly, was a singer of Irish music before their son died at the age of 3. Since then, she has been trapped in a solitary melancholy. June 16 is the couple’s anniversary, but Leo has forgotten. As the two go through their day, Kitchen, like Joyce, follows their internal dialogue. Leo, in appearance more functional than Molly, is clearly more helpless, but he gets the final soliloquy.

Molly’s mind moves tidally between past and present, whereas Leo’s jumps and bumps from one unfinished thought to the next. Both suffer in the loneliness of their marriage, but Molly has the survival skills of her namesake. She is the one who gets the epiphany: She will no longer wait for Leo; she will enjoy her life and go back to singing. “She sang with her heart and her heart did not empty. For eight years, her heart had been a sieve.... And now it was filling slowly, like a reservoir.”

Like “The Hours,” Kitchen’s novel does not feel derivative, partly because some stories can be told again and again, and partly because she is a fine, imaginative writer.

*

ON ALL SIDES NOWHERE

Building a Life in Rural Idaho

By William Gruber

Mariner Books: 126 pp., $12 paper

In the foreword to this memoir of William Gruber’s seven years of raising a young family in rural Idaho, William Finnegan complains that most writing about nature and rural life is full of “[p]iety, kitsch, self importance, sentimentalism--these deadly literary sins seem to thrive on good clean country air. Even Thoreau, flinty contrarian and poet laureate of bucolic solitude, packed a full load of pomposity into ‘Walden.’ ”

Indeed, these sins are nonexistent in Gruber’s essays; the author is more interested in the language of loggers and the economics of rural life than he is in himself. This is fine in the essays in which he is observing, but it leaves a space in the essays in which he philosophizes. He is quite taken, for example, with the idea of nothingness, life without reasons or meanings, just whatever has to be done next. This would mean more if we knew him better.

In the 1970s, when he and his wife bought their log cabin on 40 acres, the back-to-the-land movement was in full swing. “The hypocrisy of Nixon’s America” sent many intellectuals running into the woods. Gruber stayed for seven years, longer than most, but in the end he left to become an English professor. He and his family return in the summer, but it feels, he writes, as though they are returning to “real life,” that the rest is an illusion.