Two Dead Ends

...Mojo Hand is a lie, as much as, say, a book suggesting that all Jewish identity problems will be solved by quick acquisition of a plate of knishes, a Yiddish inflection and a one-way ticket to Delancey Street...

...The metaphorical passages are hardly an improvement-running along these lines: "There was only the strangeness of the night deceiving her into staying to find out what the next night would bring, and she knew with happy despair that the next night would deceive her into an eternity of nights, waiting to see what each would bring...

...Lacing the book together are lines from old and new blues songs -one of which provides the title...

...Only here is language used with power and insight...

...The other men, all of whom fall for Eunice within two sentences of meeting her, are even less present...

...Is it either cotillions or collard greens...

...The characterizations are no better...

...The descriptive passages are catalogues of cliches...

...Not Eunice's...

...The underlying truth here is this: Most children of recently assimilated Americans, if they are to synthesize an authentic existence, must at some point commune with the world which grandparents and parents deserted...

...Reviewed by NANCY WEBER Film Critic, "Manhattan East" "Badly written truth is not truth,' Yevgeny Yevtushenko said recently, and though he was not reviewing Mojo Hand he might well have been...

...Many of Jane Phillips' 22-ish contemporaries are such children...

...much to fault in Miss Phillips' thinking about the dimensions of choice facing such a girl...

...Such a journey is most often nostalgic and easy, one of many homecomings in a lifetime...

...There is a great deal of dialogue that is supposed to be good old genuine nappy-headed Southern Black talk, but it is a kind of cheap Richard Wright genuineness: Negroes calling each other Nigger, endless discussions about kinky hair, incessant use of "Aw, Lord" and the usual three- and four-letter favorites...

...On the day of her cotillion in San Francisco, Eunice suddenly decides she has had it with the fayed world of clinking teacups...

...One has to be glad, exultant even, that Eunice Prideaux has turned her back on the great Waring Blender...

...But there is much to fault in Eunice's belief that she can forge an authentic life-style by picking one set of symbols over any other...

...Are cockroach-covered walls in Louisiana more inherently authentic than clean white ones in San Francisco...

...Does the process of becoming have to be so brutal...

...everything in this book is abrupt, harsh, final...

...Some move from Scarsdale to the Lower East Side where progenitors had slaved so that their children might have Scarsdale...

...Some of them run to embrace the Europe which their immediate ancestors fled for this promised land...

...The saddest thing is that this book may not be an isolated incident...

...But Jane Phillips imposed her own young and fatally limited vision on her heroine and Mojo Hand...

...One of this generation's major tasks must be to insure that Americans of other than White Anglo-Saxon Protestant persuasion are not assimilated out of existence...

...As for the days, she was positive...

...The days were of bare structure, barred by the sun...

...This is something to worry about...

...In this first novel, the journey home to ethnic roots is undertaken by 18-year-old Eunice Prideaux who, like her creator, is a blues-singing, fair-skinned Negro of middle class background...

...Eunice in the throes of rage is merely surly...

...Does a Negro girl who has been rubbed raw by accusations that she is a passen blanc have to choose such a black on black existence that she slams the door on a civil rights worker...

...She finds him, hates him, loves him, conceives his child, leaves him, returns to him, loses him to death, and goes home to his mother to bear the child...

...No one is ever really limited to the two dead-ends Eunice Prideaux felt she had to choose between...

...The world Eunice embraces is composed of "wet armpits,' "myriads of roaches," "a naked electric bulb," "a greasy dust-coated window" and that old standby, "a toilet that smelled of stale urine...

...Books like Mojo Hand, which engage the sympathies by their perception of a major problem, can destroy rather than redeem by suggesting simplistic, which is to say lying, answers...

...Blacksnake Brown is a collage of copy from a hundred record jackets...

...Mojo Hand is untruth not only because the writing fails as thinking but because it fails as language...

...At her most assertively independent she is simply rude...

...It may be the forerunner of a new Negro literature, arising, like the Black Power movement, from the massive identity crisis accompanying civil rights accomplishments...

...another book that might have made a difference must be written off as twisted truth...

...The day was a cage and the ones inside strained under the burden of perpetuating the sham, exposing their marrow...

...She tucks her guitar under her arm and lights out for Louisiana in search of a blues singer, Blacksnake Brown, with whom she feels destiny-linked after hearing one of his records...

...Does the decision that your parents are living a life not for you mean you have to leave without even saying Goodbye, I love you...

...So another character who might have become a person had to sign herself out of the possibility of a real existence...

...Or that all Irish-Americans in search of themselves will find happiness only in the precinct, the parish, the bar...