Rick Simonson

The Beautiful Struggle, Yes
May 9, 2008

I'm not sure sitting around and working with sales reps constitutes an action-packed time, but action-packed this week feels it has been, with the full-force jump into looking at offerings for fall. So far, all three appointments, with reps from the larger houses, have included many add-ons ...

It's also been busy with visiting authors here at Elliott Bay. I was able to be at two - wonderful nights with Aleksandar Hemon, back after eight years, with The Lazarus Project (Riverhead) (a nice audience, many Bosnians and others from eastern Europe, a slew of people that walked in at the last moment, as they'd been out having a smoke until it was time), and Siri Hustvedt, with her psychologically-rich, layered, strong-voiced novel, The Sorrows of an American (Frances Coady/Holt). Other authors have been/will be at Elliott Bay - Willy Vlautin, Marc Acito, Lisa Garrigues, Andrew Foster Altschul - and Dinaw Mengestu is in town, too. The Seattle Public Library is doing "Seattle Reads The Beautiful Things That Heaven Bears," presenting him in various ways in libraries and college halls throughout the city over four days. The turnout, I hear, has been strong, wonderfully mixed and varied.

All of that and it can be hard to keep tabs on some of the arrivals that come in the form of books. I had my one on one particular arrival that finally made its way to publication this week. Street date was this Tuesday past - part of the big Random House unpacking. No, its author wasn't on Oprah or other similarly high-profile shows yet - though don't be surprised should that come in time.

From the same shipment that Barbara Walters' Audition came from was a young man's memoir: Ta-Nehisi Coates' The Beautiful Struggle: A Father, Two Sons, and an Unlikely Road to Manhood (Spiegel & Grau).

There are those books you remember hearing about before your eyes encounter them. Go back six months. Four of us were sitting around the table of a neighborhood Cuban restaurant in Miami, all there in fall-in together manner. We'd done a Miami Bookfair stint, now had seen a few sights. The next day, we would all be headed home. We talked about what we'd been reading. Sarah McNally of McNally Robinson (soon to be McNally Jackson) in New York City was talking about a book her husband, Spiegel & Grau editor Chris Jackson is working on, still forthcoming. She described it, a memoir by this young man in Baltimore, coming of age in the inner city, this intense father. She mentioned Baltimore, she mentioned the name "Coates" - at which Paul Yamazaki (City Lights) and I looked at each other, one or the other mouthing, "Paul Coates?" That's the one Coates either of us would know in Baltimore. Paul Coates is the force and the presence behind Black Classics Press (www.blackclassicbooks.com) - he and his vital work known well by people in certain circles, not so well by many others. Everyone in the bookworld should know he's about to publish a new Walter Mosley book, The Tempest Tales, next month - coming soon to all good bookstores near you (by way of PGW, I believe).

Sarah almost seemed surprised that we would know him - but she had by then kept enough company with us that she wasn't surprised by much, whether how much we knew of some things, or how utterly little of others. But it was Paul Coates, indeed, who was a major figure in this book, the father of the author.

From hearing about The Beautiful Struggle then, that mid-November eve, it felt like it took forever to ever get my hands on something to read of it (my doing, however, more diligence would have garnered results, I suspect). Finally, it did. Sidetracked and behind on so many things as I was - reps were around then, there were books to read for imminently-arriving authors, and there were certain online writings to conjure) - I still all but dropped things in order to pick up and take on this compact, young-voiced, old-souled book.

I read The Beautiful Struggle around the same time as the first press reports started to come out, exploring the relationship of Barack Obama to Rev. Jeremiah Wright. Not that what's going on out in the world like that should automatically seep into the reading of a book that happens to be by a young African American man, but in the all the early parsing and probing of what the Obama-Wright relationship might be, so much context seemed lost - people looking at the incredibly composed, assured, 46-year-old senator, but forgetting the young man, twenty-some years ago, in his 20's, who hadn't known father, community, country, or even a very sure grasp of identity, when he first came to Chicago, when that fateful meeting first occurred. All of that was being assembled, albeit with much support from all sorts of people and places, but still.

And here was this book being read - now - written by this young man (who would grow into a journalist writing for all manner of major publications), knowing in all the complex ways of a father both larger than life and tangled up in it, of siblings, of being in the streets - aware of what the larger culture was and wasn't offering. Given the stripped-away nature of real community where he was, the presence of mass media and how it seductively offers itself as false factor around which to wrap/shape identity/purpose, Ta-Nehisi Coates had to do no less than a Barack Obama to come to learn who he was and where.

The Beautiful Struggle carries a voice wise in its knowing - it's an earned wisdom. The writing voice is one rare in the encountering these days, be the work fiction, poetry, or nonfiction. Even as it recounts the life of people, very immediate people, and the life of a place, its voice is prophetic. Portent, purpose, all is there - and the struggle.

In 2008, it's good to acknowledge how much of where everything is is in struggle. No 1-2-3 ways out of where we are, no quick-fix "Standing Tall" moments on the horizon, white horses or not. Still, the hope to get where things might get can carry its audacity, and the struggle can, perhaps must, have its beauty.    

Posted by Rick Simonson on May 9, 2008 | Comments (0)