A modern, jazzy bildungsroman that uses everything from personal memoir, a fugue-like structure, poetry, images, lyrics, and diaries to paint a vivid, eloquent portrait of gay, black, Jessie Vincent Grandier and the striving African American middle class that spawned him in the late 1950s. Born to a high-yellow Upper-crust New Orleans Creole mother and a lowborn, Louisiana bayou-bred, military father, Jessie steadfastly battles to reconcile his existence with expectations and preconceptions of those around him -- black and white. He shoulders the weight of his black bourgeois family’s hopes through the ‘60s and ‘70s, his mother’s death, and the resulting familial melodrama that tears him and his family apart. If not broken, then seemingly irreparably bent, he wends his way through Harvard in the ‘70s and drinks his way through the Reagan ‘80s in gay bars from the LA barrio to Beverly Hills. When Jessie’s grandiose ambitions have abandoned him -- when he’s almost beaten, and when it’s a breath away from too late, he looks back, regards the jagged shards of his life and pieces them into a remarkable whole. The post-modern writing careens from pure ribaldry, to brutal honesty, to deeply tender, to “gonzoesque,” but at the intelligent heart of the novel is the internal struggle of dislocation, disappointment, and deconstruction of an African-American family. It is a completely unique look at race, sex, and finding redemption the hard way.
Assessment:
Plot/Idea: Gaiter shapes a bold, striking portrait of Jessie Grandier III, a gay black man coming of age in the 1980s, determined to find belonging and fulfillment in the midst of a culture that rejects the elements that form the core of his being.
Prose: The prose is lyrical and poetic at times, raw and bold at others, and Gaiter skillfully melds conflicting writing styles that mirror the clashes between Jessie's personality, society, and his troubled childhood.
Originality: The evocative setting and eye for historical context makes Gaiter's novel as distinctive as his dreamer protagonist, a man with a delicate power hidden behind a penetrating search for self.
Character/Execution: Despite Gaiter's loose structure, the novel is cleverly executed, and Jessie is a vibrant character who radiates throughout.
Date Submitted: July 09, 2024
In 1986, Jessie Grandier III, a Black Harvard graduate with grand film ambitions, wakes up in a dingy, roach-infested apartment, a far cry from his once-promising future. He spirals down when slapped with an eviction notice. Desperate, he calls his father for financial help— "the only thing [he] had worth wanting"— but gets rejected. Later, the TV company he works with faces layoffs, leaving him no recourse but to pursue his career as an artist, something he had long believed he wanted more than anything else: "That he would make beauty from nothing. That he would be more than a mere man."
Gaiter (author of Bourbon Street) presents an uncompromising, incisive story of the will to create, told with rich and urgent prose, juxtaposing Jessie's memories of a bittersweet Louisiana childhood—frequent escapades with friends, abuse at the hands of his father, and last moments with his mother—with the hard realities of adulthood as a Black and gay artist in an America hostile to such people. The narrative pulses through Jessie's psyche, choices, and experiences (like an acid trip at Harvard and a hookup in a Greenwich Village gay bar), illuminating the mind and heart of a man who admires Bach, Mingus, Ellington, and Henry Threadgill for managing to “successfully hide their humanity behind” their art. Jessie’s alienation is evoked with precision: he faces a “human realm from which he stood apart, by design, by nature, by whose fault?” Despite such passages, the narrative is alive with dark humor, striking detail, and urgent sociocultural analysis, magpied into a compelling portrait of Jessie's ambitions—"he imagined himself a life worthy of projection.”
Takeaway: Urgent novel of art, creation, race, and sexuality in Reagan-era America.
Comparable Titles: Raven Leilani’s Luster, Henry Threadgill’s Easily Slip into Another World.
Production grades
Cover: A-
Design and typography: A
Illustrations: N/A
Editing: A
Marketing copy: A
“In Leonce Gaiter’s autofiction novel, black male identity is artfully examined through the personal
history of an aspiring black writer who dreams of Hollywood success. Gaiter’s wonderfully evocative language, filled with musicality, captures the complexity of Jessie’s emotions as he struggles to make sense of his sexuality and place in the world.”
“…a bold novel. Sometimes beautiful, sometimes brutal, the prose is always thoroughly engrossing.”
“If Ernest Hemingway was black, gay, and writing about growing up in the [1960s], he would have written something like Leonce Gaiter’s “A Memory of Fictions (or) Just Tiddy-Boom… Although the whole book is written in the third person, that is easy to forget since the book is so personal that Jessie and his struggles are your own.”
5 stars - "…a rich tapestry of emotions and experiences that draw you into the action as if you’re witnessing it firsthand where it happened. From the ribald humor to the raw honesty and tender moments, the novel offers a multifaceted exploration of identity, family, and societal pressures with elegant use of dialogue and intimate narrative moments of true vulnerability and pain.”
