Rails Under My Back

...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 nineteenth 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 naturally 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, unfolding with its particular and unpredictable logic.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 teenaged 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's 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. Allen's characters have simply inherited a remarkable capacity for work from ancestors like Pappa Simmons, who said, "Labor is the deck. All else is the sea.""Rails" is a long book. Though its recurrent railway journeys create a poetic coherence, they can be so diz

Haven't read anything better since John Wideman's The Cattle Killing. It is simply outstanding. So full of life, so surprising, so beautifully written.

This novel is a wonderful story told by the members of an extraordinary family. Each one of these characters are expertly fleshed out by Allen, who portrays a closely knit family of incredibly diverse personalities. Allen tells the story using snippets of perspective from each family member, so reading the story is like piecing a puzzle together, like reading the best of Faulkner. I haven't been so engrossed in the story of a family since I read Wolfe's "Look Homeward Angel". Incidentally, these two books also have a common theme: that you can look back on where you've been, but you can never go back, and home is only where you happen to be today.

you may be interested to know that greg tate wrote a fabulous review of this book in the latest village voice supplement