`Rails' follows the tracks of two families
------------------------- "Rails Under My Back" by Jeffery Renard Allen Farrar, Straus & Giroux, $25 -------------------------
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 19th 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 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.
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 teenage 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 is 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.
"Rails" is a long book. Though its recurrent railway journeys create a poetic coherence, they can be so dizzying 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. Even fans of post-modern 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 inner world, while Gracie, 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.
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.