Sarah Phillips

After reading Interesting Women (loved it!) I searched long and hard to find other titles by Andrea Lee. I felt lucky when I was able to get used copies of both Russian Journal ( I'm still reading it) and Sarah Phillips. Sarah Phillips is a wonderful novel! Each story --linked by one centeral character--is alive with a sense of place, a specific mood, and emotion. Andrea Lee has a wonderful way of phrasing that balances the poetic with the profound. I savoured each story, sometimes reading them twice for good measure. This book is a "black classic." A wonderful coming of age story that defines the middle-class black experience.

Andrea Lee took a brave step in writing this novel by going outside of mainstream African-American lit. Her protagonist, Sarah Phillips, is not a downtrodden southerner, but rather, the product of the elite black upper-class. While this portion of African-American society is not one typically explored, Lee's novel establishes that black society is as diverse in class and attitude as any race, and suggests the absurdity of grouping all African-Americans together without consideration to their individuality. Written with moments of fabulous lyricism thrown into a novel with a purposefully dry tone, Lee's skill is obvious. This is not a novel to skip over.

The bad news is: Sarah Phillips was ahead of its time when it was published in 1984, and beyond the literary critics who praised Andrea Lee's elegantly unvarnished look at the upper reaches of black society, it did not receive much attention. The good news is: with the post-Waiting-To-Exhale realization by the white publishing world that there is no one black way of life, and that the way of life that appeared in Phillips' luminous book very much exists, Sarah Phillips may now get the attention it deserves.Far from a catalogue of I-gots that exemplifies some of the newer fiction by African Americans who are glibly portraying a non-ghetto way of life (see--I'm upper class! I have a Rolex! A Mercedes! I wear [designer of your choice here]), Lee's novel goes back to the incestuous world of interconnected black families from the Eastern Seaboard, parts of the South and Midwest, whose hallowed folkways reflect both racial pride and the ironic need to ape their white counterparts a parallel societal world. And whose foibles are as avidly watched and relayed, sotto voce, as any characters' in a nighttime soap opera.Sarah Phillips explores what happens when post-Civil Rights progeny--children who had to be Ten Times Better Than the whites against whom they compete (and by whom they are judged, usually more harshly) to a wider world where race is noted, but does not serve as the invisible force-field it did for their parents. Sarah, with the confidence of her family history, is able to be both detached from her background and amused by it, even as she keeps it in reserve, if necessary, to shield herself from the glib snobbism of the Europeans among whom she's chosen to live.Lee does not sugar coat Sarah's wish to be the Only One--the only black person--during her sojurn in Europe. But she makes Sarah three-dimensional enough that the reader understands well enough the urge behind the odd wish to be exotique in a foreign setting.Readers who are revolted by the current urge of some black writers to trumpet their socially important connections will be refreshed by Lee's chronicle of this snippy, edgy young woman.This is very much the real thing.

Sarah Phillips allows readers to gain insight into the black middle class, and the rituals and contradictions that the exposure to an integrated society can create. Considering the time frame in which the story is set, it is, at times, disturbing.

I cannot understand why it is that this brilliant piece of work is virtually unheard of. Andrea Lee's collection of stories about one central figure, Sarah Phillips, is masterful and universal in its exploration of the journey from girlhood to womanhood. These stories approach adolescence with a rare grace and subtlety that deserves a wide audience, one of all races and ages. Please read this book!