White on Black on White - Softcover

Dowell, Coleman

Softcover

ISBN 10: 1852421606 ISBN 13: 9781852421601

Publisher: Serpent's Tail, 1990

Like James Balwin?s Another Coutry, White on Black on White, Coleman Dowell?s last book, is about the collision of race and sex. Edgar Cayce, a black policeman, is the central figure of the novel. We read Cayce?s memoir - in fact written by the narrator who is white whilst Cayce is black, gay whislt Cayce is straight. Cayce himself approve of the narrator?s impersonation: ?there isn?t a lot I?d object to or change...? Which is not surprising since Dowell?s point is that the essence of black is given in its interdependence with the other (white) and vice versa. In White on Black on White, Coleman Dowell has written an ambitious novel whose brilliance resides in the perfect fit between formal innovations and what is being said.

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Review:

?Coleman Dowell has written the most penetrating novel we have had about blacks and whites in the United States. He has chosen to approach this subject - the single most imporstant American theme - through an examination of sexual obsession, thereby exposing racist hypocrisy by means of desperate honesty of desire? Edmund White

About the Author:

Born in Kentucky in 1925, Coleman Dowell is one of the great post-war US writers. He is the author of One of the Children is Crying, Island People and Mrs October Was Here. He commited suicide in 1985, depressed at his lack of literary success. Coleman Dowell's books have recently been re-issued in the States and translations into French and Germans are forthconing.

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