Among novelists writing today, Reed ranks in the top of those commanding a brilliant set of resources and techniques. The prose is flexible, easy in its shift of gears and capacity to move on a variety of levels. The techniques of the cartoon, the caricature, the vaudevillean burlesque, the straight narrative, the detective story, are summoned at will.
But his management of his resources in The Last Days of Louisiana Red fails to create a lasting or deep impression. The novel deals with areas which afford rich soil for the satirist, since rebellious and revolutionary movements are always harassed by paradox and baneful fruit no matter how necessary such movements reveal themselves to be. In the black movement: the attempt to transform criminal activity into political purpose aborting and now revealing a black community as the greatest victim of crime; the ideological shifts which threaten to swing around a circle; the romanticization of a jungle street world whose deadend "hipness" was often sold as true blackness, etc. What we get of such matters in the novel seems to come out of a simplicity which has not first felt the pressure of complexity. Except for an individual statement here and there, the center of values from which the attacks are to be made turn out to be rather vague suggestions about the artist, imagination, symbolic conjure. Or an uncritical and undisciplined endorsement of middleclass striving.
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