The Thumbnail Book Reviews
by John Q McDonald --- 24 July 2007
by Bart Schneider
It's a bright morning out in the Avenues in San Francisco (among those streets numbered 2 to 48, marching to the sea on the western slope of the city). Cassius Clay has just won his first major title match, making it February of 1964. Jake Roseman is a San Francisco lawyer starting his day during which he will lead a civil rights protest in front of a San Francisco Cadillac dealership. It is a busy time in the civil rights movement, and the middle of an already turbulent decade. Jake, even after his wife committed suicide a year and a half before the book opens, will be present for a lot of the local protests and other turbulent activities. Maybe just a little conveniently located for some of them. Nisa is a young woman of mixed race who, after leaving UC Berkeley, has settled in a small Chinatown apartment. She sees Jake at the Cadillac protest and is smitten by his middle-aged good looks. Soon, they're tumbling together in Nisa's bed and pawing each other in jazz clubs (the sex is occasionally at the edges of male fantasy). Meanwhile, young Simon, son of a prominent black Baptist preacher, is discovering his homosexuality and is conflicted between his dalliance with a gay white man and his membership in the Nation of Islam.
All of this is set in a beautifully realized San Francisco of 1964. In fact, this is what Schneider pulls off best. He clearly loves the city from which he hails, and recalls it in accurate detail. Jake must reconcile his love of Nisa with his two children and his aging racist father, in a time when racial awareness and its political significance is acute. Nisa, more thinly drawn than Jake, is well-off enough not to need employment to get by. She dabbles in theater, including a street theater remeniscent of the SF Mime Troupe. Simon and his lover, another actor, are even farther beyond the fringe than the Nation of Islam, and they look forward to a day when gay rights become as much of a cause as racial integration. But Simon is willing to sacrifice a lot to deny his identity. Does it sound like an ambitious novel, yet? Well, it is also peopled by thinly disguised figures from San Francisco of the era. Jake, too, appears at the Free Speech Movement at UC Berkeley, and Schneider practically credits Jake with defusing the situation. Jake is everywhere, and, despite the engaging travelogue through 1964, this is the one main drawback to the book. Schneider tries a little too hard to cover all of the bases he can think of. In too short a book for all this conflict, he pulls in a vast array of people and political strife. Several characters get left behind in the process. This is unfortunate, as, overall, the book has a refreshingly realistic tone to its descriptions of the times. The scenery is vivid, and much of what transpires is engrossing, and drawn without too much excess. Oddly enough, it may yet have been a great book if it wasn't quite so ambitious.