One Hundred Dollar Misunderstanding

I picked up Robert Gover's One Hundred Dollar Misunderstanding to read because of the recent events in Durham, North Carolina where a black stripper, hired to perform at a Duke University lacrosse team party, has accused three white males at the party of raping her. Published 45 years ago this book has nothing to do with rape, but it does deal a lot with issues of sexuality as it relates to class and race, privilege and poverty in the southern United States. Jim is a white college sophomore in a Southern college on a Friday night with a hundred dollars in his pocket. Kitten is a 14 year old African-American prostitute. Their paths cross as Jim visits a "Negro house of ill repute." The book proceeds with Jim and Kitten narrating alternate chapters. Each sees the other as an answer to their needs and their encounter builds into a weekend of misunderstandings as their different backgrounds and expectations keep them from ever having meaningful communication. Yet, despite the insurmountable cultural chasm that separates them, their determination eventually makes small inroads possible. This book made history at the time because of the frank discussion of sexuality and racial differences. Today, the terminology seems remarkably tame, even quaint. Yet the issues raised about sexual morality and class privilege are as relevant as ever. Gore Vidal said: "There is always a division between what a society does and what it says it does, and what it feels about what it says it does. But nowhere is this conflict more vividly revealed than in the American middle class's attitude toward sex, that continuing pleasure and sometimes duty we have, with the genius of true pioneers, managed to tie in knots. Robert Gover unties no knots but he shows them plain and I hope this book will be read by every adolescent in the country, which is most of the population." To truly appreciate this story it is important to remember that it is fiction. No 14 year old girls were lured into prostitution in the writing or reading of this book. Robert Gover states it as follows: "The caricatures in this story never were and aren't. If a reader happens to transmute them from typo-alphabetic symbols to figments of his imagination, they will continue to not exist, except as figments of his imagination. This also applies to the events which are this story - they didn't happen and don't. Any reader who imagines them happening I asked to please remember he is doing just that - imagining. In other words, the following is a made-up, untrue story." As an untrue story, this book still does a great job of pointing out, through caricature, some of the seemingly timeless problems of class and privilege in American society, especially as they relate to the sexual behavior of the middle class.

In the late 1950's, you couldn't even curse in a novel. You had to dance around sex, and you certainly couldn't portray race relations in an honest light. How in the world was a realistic story ever told? Along comes Robert Gover, an American whose novel was exiled to Europe by the puritan values that would soon tumble. One Hundred Dollar Misunderstanding makes cartoon characters out of the stereotypes that dominated the races by sneaking them under the cultural radar in the bodies of a young black prostitute and a rich white college kid. This oil and water relationship has more in common than one might think. Before this quick and engaging read is over, the genius becomes the fool, the chicken becomes the fox, and the reader just might question his/her own assumptions.

Book Review by Maryanne RaphaelONE HUNDRED DOLLAR MISUNDERSTANDING By Robert Gover, Creative Arts Book Company, Berkeley, CA By using cartoonish exaggerations in a novel, telling the story from the perspective of an uneducated, intelligent 14 year old Black prostitute and a naive White college sophomore, author Robert Gover turned his "serious novel about race relations"into a world-wide best seller.. This fast moving, easy to read satire captured readers everywhere. Dealing with human communication, ONE HUNDRED DOLLAR MISUNDERSTANDING has something to say to everyone. In the early sixties, this novel which mixed sex, race and money shocked America. Now, 40 years later it still has readers turning pages.

You'll remember "Kitten," the fourteen-year old prostitute and protagonist, for a long time. It's not quite fair, of course, to oppose her jazzy exuberance against J.C.'s Chamber of Commerce persona, but then who cares....Centered around the black part of an anonymous town in the early 1960's, this book follows the travails of a white college sophomore who decides to increase his "sociological" understanding of the town's other residents -- poor, black citizens who shift just south of the law. When J.C. slinks down to the local cathouse, he's not quite sure what brought him there. Male curiosity, of course, and boredom and desperation at his failing grades, but he's not quite capable of parting the mists that shroud his, um, intellect. The education he ultimately receives doesn't push him out of his towel-snapping frathouse habitat, but it does make an impression. Or at least it should.Kitten, on the other hand, needs no such lessons in life. Although she spends a good part of the book naked (sometimes working, sometimes just vacuuming), her corpus matters much less than her colosum. I'm half-in-love, I confess, and you will be too. Unless you spent your college days hopping from one formal to the next.

The book recounts a white middleclass college student's sociological study of prostitution in a small midwestern college town in the fifties. The study focusses on a teenaged black prostitute. The student exhibits a remarkable lack of prejudice for a white person writing in that era. The chapters alternate between narratives by the student and the prostitute as the story unfolds. Of course the student is compelled by his use of the scientific method to participate in a number of sexual activities. It is interesting to note the observations of the girl toward the student. She might as well be conducting her own sociological experiment. Both are astute observers and it is interesting how their observations are shaded by their backgrounds. I read this amazing book as a college student and remembered it vividly -- except for the part about what happened to the money at the end. So I was forced to buy it and read it again. It was even better than I remembered it being. I am glad it is still in print. How come the others in the trilogy aren't?