Don't Erase Me(1997) by Carolyn Ferrell

 1,001 Novels: A Library of America

Don't Erase Me (1997) 

by Carolyn Ferrell

South Bronx, New York

New York: 39/105

The Bronx: 7/7

   Don't Erase Me, a harrowing collection of short-stories about materially disadvantaged young women growing up in the South Bronx in the early 1990's, closes out the Bronx sub-chapter of editor Susan Straight's 1,001 Novels: A Library of America list. Ferrell published this collection back in 1997- one of the stories ended up making it into more than one anthology and Ferrell landed a job teaching at Sarah Larwrence.  She didn't publish another book until July of 2021 when Dear Ms. Metropolitan came out- a grim tale about three young women who are kidnapped, tortured and raped for a decade by a neighbor.   Don't Erase Me isn't quite that grim- although several of the included short stories- all about young minority women living in the South Bronx (except for one that takes place in Orange County for some reason), recall multiple tropes that I remember from 90's newspapers.  In one story, eighth graders compete to be "school wives"- i.e. get pregnant and married in the eighth grade.  In another, a single mother of three struggles with her HIV diagnosis, which she apparently contracted from her step-father.  In a third, a gay African American student is murdered by classmates. 

  Also worth mentioning that Don't Erase Me is not a novel, it's a collection of short stories.  I think this is the first short story collection on the list and it's hard to see why this would be the one book to pick in a project putatively dedicated to the novel.

  It is all pretty dark stuff, and frankly, every novel in this sub-chapter was pretty dark.  Not to tip my forthcoming summary post, but How the Garcia Girls Lost Their Accent by Julia Alvarez, which was recently named to Atlantic Magazine's Top 150 American Novels list, looks like the class of the bunch.  Charming Billy is also up there because it's a prize winner, but the rest, yikes.  Not fun. None of these books were fun and a couple were positively excruciating. 

Hoops (1981) by Walter Dean Myers

 1,001 Novels: A Library of America

Hoops (1981)

by Walter Dean Myers

New York: 38/105

Harlem: 6/14

   I've started reading the YA titles from the 1,001 Novels: A Library of America list on my Kindle app on my cell phone (Samsung Galaxy)- the YA titles don't take a huge amount of effort to understand, and I can read them during times when I otherwise wouldn't be reading at all- watching television or what have you.  This lessens the annoyance I feel at having to read yet another YA title.  It is pretty clear to me at this point that editor Susan Straight is interested in including a wide swath of YA titles at the expense of more adult books that cover the same territory.  Hoops is about New York City basketball life circa the late 1960's, early 1970's, I think- it was hard to pin down the exact time.  It's hard for me to believe that Straight picked this book instead of The Basketball Diaries by Jim Carroll, which basically covers the same time and place trading Harlem for Hell's Kitchen.  To be fair, The Basketball Diaries has a fair amount of heroin usage, and maybe that is not what Straight is all about, though she hasn't shied away from books ABOUT the drug trade in NYC (See Spidertown.)

     It was good by the standards of YA lit, but I found it wanting compared to The Basketball Diaries. 

Home to Harlem (1928) by Claude McKay

Jamaican-American author Claude McKay

 1,001 Novels: A Library of America

Home to Harlem (1928)

by Claude McKay

Harlem, New York City

New York: 37/105

Harlem: 5/14

 I was actually interested in reading this novel from the Harlem Renaissance- it faced a fraught path to publication and a rocky reception once published- right before the Great Depression- fell out of print and was later revived after his death.  Today he's recognized as an apostle of the Harlem Renaissance and a precursor to Black/Queer literature- McKay was either gay or bisexual and simply lived at a place and time when it wasn't acceptable to be public.    McKay's focus in Home to Harlem is on a pair of young black men, one born in the United States, the other a Haitian immigrant (McKay emigrated from the interior of Jamaica to the United States before relocating to Europe for several years).    The over-all vibe is similar to the beat genre of literature that would come decades later- McKay's plot reminded me of Kerouac or Bukowski, i.e. the lives of men who live on the fringes by some kind of conscious choice in a quest to escape 20th century conformity.

  Today it would be tough to ask someone to read Home to Harlem because of the frequent and prolific use of the n-word by the characters- all black characters- to describe themselves, others or even as a adjective- the use of the phrase "n word brown" is constant to describe the color suits and shoes.  Obviously, McKay knows what he is doing and the usage here is much like the usage in hip hop decades later, an attempt by the victimized to reclaim the word, but it is also hard not to think that these characters are consciously accepting their denigration by white society by embracing the n word in their everyday speech. It's certainly a challenge for the modern ear.  Hard to imagine an audiobook version.

Charming Billy (1998) by Alice McDermott

1,001 Novels: A Library of America

Charming Billy (1998) 

by Alice McDermott

The Bronx, New York City

New York: 36/105

The Bronx: 5/7*

* mis-mapped- should be in Queens....

   Charming Billy won the National Book Award in 1998.   Unclear why the 1,001 Novels: A Library of America has placed it in the Bronx instead of Queens.  To quote the first line of the New York Times review, "The Irish Catholic world Alice McDermott writes about in her magical new novel, ''Charming Billy,'' is located in Queens, not Dublin."   McDermott is one of those writers "celebrated for her granular, nuanced portraits of mid-century American life" who I have studiously avoided for my entire life.  Indeed, the 1,001 Novels project I've undertaken is specifically an attempt to rectify this purposeful omission. That means I'm trying to keep a positive and optimistic attitude about reading hundreds of books about alcoholic ethnic-white Americans and sad teenage girls trying to get out of their bedrooms.

  At least Charming Billy is an award winner, another category I'm keeping in the back of my mind as I go through this list.  Additionally, Charming Billy is neither a work of detective fiction nor a YA title, so that also made the reading experience tolerable.  Finally, there is no denying that Charming Billy is chock filled with literary technique- using a kaleidoscopic approach that takes the reader backwards and forwards in time and space (from Queens to Long Island and back, at least.)    The Billy of the title is a recently deceased alcoholic, and the book explores his lifelong "great disappointment"-  being abandoned by an Irish girl-woman who promises to return from a visit home to marry him and subsequently throws him over for a local lad- and the impact it may or may not have had on his lifetime of alcoholism. 

   McDermott and her characters are not naive dummies- the narrator- who I think is a younger sister of the extended clan- early on questions the premise that a lifetime of alcoholism  could possibly be triggered by a single romantic disappointment.   But here we are, three hundred pages about the impact of said romantic disappointment.   Also, this is another book on the 1,001 Novels list where the dysfunction of a single family member ends up defining the life of all the other family members.   There are a lot of those books on this list.

The Blackboard Jungle (1954) by Evan Hunter

1,001 Novels: A Library of America

The Blackboard Jungle (1954)

by Evan Hunter

New York: 35/105

The Bronx: 6/7

    Quite frequently I check out one of these 1,001 Novels: A Library of American books as an Audiobook for a library and find the experience simply excruciating.  I really learn about my own prejudices based on my positive/negative reactions- as clear an example of the "unconscious bias" phenomenon in my own life.  One of my most disturbing discoveries is that I have issues appreciating narrator voices that mimic the tones of the American underclass- of whatever ethnicity- I just find those voices grating and unpleasant, whether they be male or female, white, black, hispanic etc- a disturbing discovery and something that I am trying to address.  

   This book wasn't in that category, but it was in this category of American fiction from the earlier half of the 20th century that also gives me issues for different reasons.  

Ruby (1976) by Rosa Guy

Author Rosa Guy

1,001 Novels: A Library of America

Ruby (1976)

by Rosa Guy

515 Malcolm X Boulevard, Harlem

New York: 34/105

Harlem: 4/14

    Ruby is another YA title from 1,001 Novels: A Library of America.  This is the standard YA plot of a young woman who is trying to "get out of her bedroom" and into the wider world but faces difficulties.  Here, the narrator is the daughter of widowed West Indian immigrant of African descent, living in 70's Harlem, who falls in love with her female classmate.  Pretty daring stuff for the 1970's, and I didn't make it as a YA title while I was reading the book.   Rosa Guy is an iconic figure, the only female founder of the Harlem Writers Guild in 1950, a group that was instrumental in promoting the efforts of a generation of African American writers, including Maya Angelou. 

   This being a YA book, you don't hear much about Harlem or NYC, since Ruby, again, spends most of the book either inside her house, at school or racing around trying to dodge her controlling father.   Other than the precocious lesbian relationship, the most eye raising moment was the open use of the "N" word by a white teacher at Ruby's high school.  Hard to imagine that today!