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Days Without Weather by Cecil Brown

1984; University of Nebraska Press; Volume: 19; Issue: 2 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1353/wal.1984.0077

1948-7142

Janis Helbert,

Canadian Identity and History

Reviews 151 This collecton of fourteen documents, divided by decades and inter­ spersed with commentaries that provide both context and continuity, includes women’s responses to a C.P.R. questionnaire (What Women Say of the Canadian North-West, used as propaganda for settlement) and even one article by an Englishman settled in the United States who gives a bleak picture of the English ranchwoman’s life — and whom Agnes Skrine rebuts. But the bulk of the selections are accounts by individual women of life in Western Canada. The informative introduction supplies some details about the society from which redundant gentlewomen came, as well as about the one they entered. Jackel also speculates on the positive impact of British middle-class women on Western Canadian life. Numerous black and white plates show the reality behind the settlers’ or visitors’words. In one photo two women home­ steaders, dressed up, books on laps, sit in front of their tiny, possibly even windowless, first dwelling; in another a group of women and children, bonnetted and most of them in gleaming white, stand by their fund-raising booth, their cause the first hospital in Cereal, Alberta. Indeed, for all its mud and mosquitoes, the Canadian West offered scope to the woman who, as Agnes Skrine described her, really knew her métier de femme. LOIS K. SMEDICK, University of Windsor Days Without Weather. By Cecil Brown. (New York: Farrar Straus Giroux, 1983. 250 pages, $12.95.) This book’s cachet is that it’s a Hollywood novel from a black perspective. Not too long ago, black comedians starting out in Los Angeles played the funky dives on the Chitlin’ Circuit down in Watts. Jonah Drinkwater, the novel’s protagonist, hangs out with other up-and-coming black comedians at the showcase comedy clubs in the famed Sunset Strip area of West Hollywood. A rural Southerner fresh out of college, Jonah works in the mailroom at Democracy Motion Picture Studio while he hones the material that he hopes will skyrocket his comedy act to headliner status. He’s a hayseed Eddie Murphy about to “bust loose.” Jonah’s relationship with his corrupt Uncle Gadge changes all that. Gadge Drinkwater is a black movie mogul who never was. A fatcat screen­ writer at Democracy Studio, Gadge works out of the Tara Mansion from the old Gone With the Wind set. Gadge is a stock villain who has all the usual movieland vices — dope, dames, and dirty-dealing. The blaxploitation flicks he churns out for The Man have camped-up titles like Rhapsody in Black and Blue and Star-Spangled Rhythm. To assuage his own guilt, Gadge sets Jonah up for the big sell-out. The novel’s climax occurs when Jonah “gets in touch with” his rage at Gadge’s “betrayal” and somewhat willfully explodes all over the stage during his nightclub comedy routine. If he doesn’t exactly torch the audience, he does a yeoman job of exposing his own lack of insight. 152 Western American Literature This barebones plot outline makes Brown’s novel seem more coherent than it actually is. Ernest Hemingway once said “literature is architecture” and that’s a principle Cecil Brown has yet to grasp. He achieves a kind of incendiary truth in some of the individual comic vignettes, but the structure of the novel as a whole is badly flawed. The point-counterpoint of Jonah’s two career tracks is mishandled and the tension is slack. The most inexcus­ able lapse, however, is that Brown uses only a few words to gloss over the crucial four months in which Jonah changes from a sincere naïf into a slick Hollywood operator. The novel fades out on the revisionist note of Jonah totting up his Holly­ wood experiences and waxing philosophical about his own impending success as a comedian. Jonah winds up as every soulless young black comedian who would like to muscle in on Richard Pryor’s territory. Jonah’s act, and the novel itself, are acts of hommage to Pryor’s brand of passionate, selfconfronting comedy. It seems more likely, however, that if Jonah makes it, it will be as a fake-out artist like the best...