A Review of
Gayl Jones’s Palmares
Originally published in the
Rain Taxi Review of Books, Spring 2021
Palmares
Gayl Jones
Beacon Press ($27.95)
In his lamentable pan of Gayl Jones’s 1999 masterpiece, Mosquito, Henry Louis Gates, Jr. recounted the rumor that Jones had several completed novels in the can that she’d written when she was in graduate school. Both prolific as a writer and sparing in her publication history, Jones’s major work until now breaks down into two distinct eras: her brilliantly dark and edgy mid-1970s novels, Corregidora and Eva’s Man, which were released a year apart, and her virtuosic and inspiring late-1990s novels, The Healing and Mosquito, which she also released over two successive years. Reportedly recanting the pessimistic view of love and sex in her first two novels, Jones attempted to have them taken out of print in the 1990s, and her editor suggested she publish new books instead. Jones’s response was to submit two of the best novels of the decade. So comprehensively explored and artistically integrated were these already completed novels that one of the characters in 1998’s The Healing is reading a copy of the 1999 Mosquito in its opening pages, a masterstroke that she generously includes as a gift to her rapt rereaders. Rivaling the mastery and vision of her earlier novels’ editor, Toni Morrison, Jones asserts herself with these two works as a truly towering artist. Repeatedly referring to and riffing on Chaucer, Cervantes, and Joyce in her exultant word- and world-play, Jones’s exhaustively swirling narrative voices and techniques make a strong case for her inclusion among even their rarefied company.
Mosquito’s exorbitant capaciousness and finger-on-the-pulse relevance—its plot follows a Black woman trucker who joins the Sanctuary movement to transport migrants from Mexico into the United States in a new kind of Underground Railroad—resulted in a joyfully playful dream/nightmare vision of America that should have set it alongside Infinite Jest, but instead it tanked and has almost completely disappeared. The Healing garnered some of the attention and praise its brilliance deserved, but Mosquito isn’t even mentioned on the list of Jones’s books on the back of her newly released novel, Palmares. Gates’s review lambasted Mosquito’s narrative inconsistencies in almost exactly the same language that Mosquito explicitly praises the narrative inconsistencies in Don Quixote, and this kind of play between the author and her novel’s voices is one of its great merits and pleasures, rather than one of its flaws. Jones’s multiplicious curiosity requires a consciousness far larger than any realistic narrator could provide, and so she bends the post-Flaubertian rules of naturalism in all the most deliberate and pleasurable ways, and does so with a deeply structured concinnity that orchestrates her effusion into symphonic order. Nodding to the playfully messy early novels that Jones loves so much, Mosquito recalls the mad yarn-spinning of Tristram Shandy, had Sterne had any idea where his novel was going, or any capacity for revision. In this, Jones is firmly among the great Twentieth-Century Modernists, especially her beloved Joyce, who brought a Miltonic rigor to the loopy narrative structures he was parodying.
Readers may or may not want to look into Jones’s shocking personal life, but taking in the few glimpses we have of the literary mind outside of her novels affords an illuminating view of her scope and aims and aesthetic. Famously reclusive and tight-lipped, Jones has given few interviews, and the 1998 QPB edition that collects Corregidora, Eva’s Man, and The Healing includes a 1978 interview she did with her former academic adviser and mentor, poet Michael S. Harper. Not yet thirty in the interview, Jones displays an astounding range of knowledge and interest, and hearing her thoughts on literature here is like witnessing a magic pyrotechnic parade. One of the major shifts in Twentieth-Century literature—and perhaps its greatest source of innovation—was in all the new voices and perspectives that arose from previously unheard demographics, with each one speaking a version of their language that brought new vitality to that language’s capacity for expression, in both content and form. Jones in this interview speaks of the burgeoning literatures of the Americas—especially Latin, Native, and African American, discussing each in great detail and complexity—as an inspiration for her approach, portraying these new voices as the avant-garde that she wants to explore in her own writing. Riffing on the radical aspects of The Canterbury Tales and Don Quixote and Finnegans Wake, Jones rightfully regards these disorienting works as forerunners of the innovation that so many new voices were bringing to her century’s exciting new era of Multicultural Modernism.
In the decade after her groundbreaking mid-Seventies novels Jones published a number of collections of short stories and poetry, and then in the next dozen years before The Healing and Mosquito her creative voice was silent as she presumably honed those two novels to perfection. But then after Mosquito: complete silence for more than two decades. Was the failure of her masterpiece to blame for this silence, and was this silence permanent? Or was she working on something even bigger and better? With the newly released Palmares, a vast novel that explores the vein of history that served as the distant backdrop for Jones’s debut novel, these questions remain unanswered. Beacon Press announces Palmares as the first of five new works by Jones to be released over the next few years, but is Palmares actually new? Or is it one of the cache of novels she reportedly wrote in graduate school? The information from Beacon Press seems deliberately cagey about this question, and just as Jones’s peak era of The Healing and Mosquito feels a world away from the voices of her early novels, Palmares creates another cesura in her oeuvre, almost seeming to be by a completely different author. And one not anywhere near her peak powers.
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| Gayl Jones |
Narrated by a Seventeenth-Century Brazilian slave named Almeyda, who joins a fugitive slave state that struggles for autonomous existence, Palmares certainly fits in with many of Jones’s recurring themes and methods. There’s the quietly observant female narrator, the indistinct mother and vivid, magic-wielding grandmother, the search for a stable sense of belonging and self in a hostile world, the nightmare of colonialism and its effect on how individuals and groups perceive themselves, especially in questions of racial quiddity—all these are vintage Jones territory. But what’s missing is the dazzling Jones voice and the forward-moving sense of narrative inevitability that holds together the disparate themes and episodes and keeps the reader enthusiastically swept up in the momentum. In terms of voice, Jones is barred by her historical subject matter from using her highly cultivated African-Kentuckian version of English, which becomes more virtuosic and intoxicating in each of her first four novels, instead writing in the flattest and most declarative “standard” English. There’s no slang, no play, and almost no Jones to be heard and felt in these sentences.
At her peak, Jones is capable of pulling off set-pieces and bits worthy of Proust or Hurston or Pynchon and stacking them one after another so that every part of the novel is the best and most fun part. Like Henry Fielding, whose outrageous narrator in Tom Jones’s proto-meta discussions of itself hilariously points out each time he elides the tedious parts of the story, she seems to have saved up all the juiciest and most magical morsels of life to put into each scene, whether joyful or tragic, and left everything else on the cutting-room floor. In Palmares, however, Almeyda seems to drift through an eldritch dream that’s full of meaning and portent for the person experiencing it but a boring drag for the person hearing or reading about it. And this is a novel about slavery, which is some of the most inherently interesting subject matter possible. Most of the scenes are just people coming into rooms, waiting, having some sort of uninspired interaction, and then leaving. This aspect of the novel serves as a good argument for it being Jones’s college writing, because she doesn’t seem to have developed the narrative strategies that made her other novels so seamlessly engaging and effective.
One of Jones’s best strategies for cramming all of her multitudes into novels that are peopled by feasibly limited characters is to have her narrators quote and ruminate over things they heard from characters they admire and think of as wiser and more knowledgeable than themselves, so that there never has to be one character who serves as Jones’s encyclopedic mouthpiece. In The Healing the narrator frequently discusses topics she learned about from her complexly brilliant friend Nadine (aka Mosquito), and in Mosquito Nadine is the limited character who ponders the topics introduced to her by her hyper-curious friends Delgadina and Ray. It’s a very clever and effective way to keep the novels’ information and meanings diverse and decentralized, so that the book’s dizzying disquisitions are never just a lecture straight from Jones. In Palmares this device seems yet to be discovered. The narrator has almost no access to information or meaning, despite her intimate connection to the leader of Palmares, as well as her having been taught to read at a young age by a priest with quite interesting tastes, and this leaves the texture of the historical tapestry that surrounds Almeyda seem as blank as the walls that contain most of the novel’s scenes. This missing texture could be construed as Jones’s comment on how little access women historically have had to the information and powers that dictate their lives, but if so, she doesn’t compensate for the blankness with much of anything vivid or compelling.
Jones does allow herself some literary leeway by having a few characters appear who are clearly walk-ons from her favorite novels—most notably Don Quixote and Ahab—but there’s little resonance in these intertextual anachronisms, and no play in them at all, which may be why there’s so little resonance. Jones doesn’t seem to be having any fun with the writing of Palmares, leaving the reader just as joylessly unengaged, which compared to the trajectory of her first four novels makes yet another argument for this being very early work. Jones’s first two published novels depict a bleak, humorless world where almost everything’s negative, especially human connection, but the writing in these novels is joyfully inventive and luscious and works as a positive creative force. Then in The Healing and Mosquito the exuberance of the writing explodes into the subject matter to create uproariously pleasurable worlds of deeply meaningful play. One of the best cantrips in Mosquito occurs at a reading by an African-American woman writer who’s published a “blues novel” that sounds almost exactly like Jones’s Corregidora. Nadine approaches the author afterward and discusses how she thinks the book’s monochromatic shades of blue don’t capture a full enough story, and the author agrees with her and seems to see the chromatic light that led Jones away from Corregidora and Eva’s Man toward the much better book she’s in. This hilariously meta metanoia in the blues novel’s author, who is clearly Jones, is worthy of Fielding or Proust, and it seems unlikely that after such a damascene turn away from the minor key that Jones would return to such muted tones in a later novel.
Aesthetic bliss may not be the criterion that works for everyone when judging literature, but Mosquito is just about as much fun as it’s possible to have with a book in your hand, while Palmares simply feels like work, rather than play. Many readers will value the gravely crucial subject matter of Palmares and not worry about its artistic flatness, and for its subject matter alone this novel is worth reading. Few will want to read it, though, and fewer still will want to reread it. Let’s hope that Jones has been working her eremitic gramarye these past few decades and will soon emerge with another magic masterpiece.
—David Wiley
