Helpful Score: 1
I really wish I could rate this book higher, but the honest truth is that is just sort of meandered around for over 300 pages and nobody lived happily ever after, or learned anything, or achieved anything.
What people remember most about it, of course, is the deaf-mute character John Singer, who is befriended by each of the other four main characters -- an African-American doctor who exhorts his friends and family to seek out education and self-improvement, an itinerant white labor organizer, a young girl struggling to grow up in a family teetering on the brink of poverty, and the owner of an all-night restaurant. Each of these characters tells Singer their deepest secrets and desires, and each sees reflected back from him the validation of those desires.
There is an uncanny prescience in the book, written in 1940, with the doctor proposing a march of black people on Washington D.C., for the purpose of drawing attention to the injustices laid on them by their society. But overall, it's a depressing tale without much else to recommend it.
What people remember most about it, of course, is the deaf-mute character John Singer, who is befriended by each of the other four main characters -- an African-American doctor who exhorts his friends and family to seek out education and self-improvement, an itinerant white labor organizer, a young girl struggling to grow up in a family teetering on the brink of poverty, and the owner of an all-night restaurant. Each of these characters tells Singer their deepest secrets and desires, and each sees reflected back from him the validation of those desires.
There is an uncanny prescience in the book, written in 1940, with the doctor proposing a march of black people on Washington D.C., for the purpose of drawing attention to the injustices laid on them by their society. But overall, it's a depressing tale without much else to recommend it.
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