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Sorry, but I don't recall race being an issue in this book. While 3/4 through it, perhaps I was sleepy when reading a section or it is to come. Can you reference where it was, other than mentioning some workers that might be non-caucasion, but that wasn't racism related. I would suggest racism is portraying an entire class, and I just didn't see it. I am sincerely interested in your thoughts.

Prate's series of meetings with the telephone repairman, Nate Baker. At one point Prate tells him that Irene, as a teacher, "always liked the black kids."
He also expresses surprise at another point that Baker's mother was a resident, not a worker, at the nursing home.

Allen's right. If somebody actually likes black people, it is most likely a condescending, smug "like" that is either a type of reaction formation or originates from guilt of some kind and is still racism, only in sheep's clothing.

Savage:
That's not at all what I mean. I think Prate was genuine, if a bit clumsy, in his attempts to be friendly to Nate.
I think Prate also recognized subtle, but not malicious, prejudices in his comments to the black man.
We all have them, and the key to dealing with them is admitting they exist ... it's part of being human.

. . . found lots of points to address about the book.: health care, race, the ravages of Alzheimer's Disease, the power of community.

A character suffering the ravages of Alzheimer's--really, the ravages of anything--is a clear sign of novelistic desperation, as is any evolving relationship between an old person and a young person. Serious novelists stay away from that sort of thing.

The best subjects for novels are (in no particular order) ambition, race, boxing, war, the meaninglessness of life, love or marriage (not both), and consumerism.

I'm not sure it's widely agreed that we all have them (subtle prejuidices), Allen. It's few and far between when you hear a black person admit or imply they are inherently or institututionally prejudiced against a white person, because, and even if they do, we all know it doesn't matter, because one group are the oppressors and the other group are the oppressed.

I don't think most black people know how it feels being a pale, overly literate, obsessed with the best-preschool- for- their-kids, portfolio studying jackdaw who can't dance a hoot. I think we may have to have some type of "sensativity training". Some friends and I are trying to put together a program and if we can get the grant money, it's a go.

What do you think

Anon, a little harsh? By the authors own words, the book is described as creative non-fiction, so it is not meant to be a novel.

Allen works race into just about everything he writes.

Same thing with most blacks, actually. Turn on C-Span, or our local channel 13. If there's a black politician talking, you can be sure they're talking about black issues and portraying blacks as victims of something. (Try it if you don't believe me.)

Would love to see them getting all activist about the black thugs with guns that are robbing and murdering people all over our city but that ain't gonna happen.

I'm paid to be harsh. As an English teacher, the state of NC signs my paycheck for my critical rigor and my ability to recognize the dangling modifier in this sentence. And one cannot be too harsh or critically rigorous when dealing with characters with Alzheimer's. This is just basic first-day-of-creative-writing-class stuff: just as mass produces gravity, so characters with Alzheimer's produce sentimental, growth-as-a-person, learning-important-life-lessons rubbish. There are many mental disabilities/diseases/disorders with literary potential. Alzheimer's is not one of them.

The same goes for relationships between old people and young people. Let me guess: they learn important life lessons from one another.
How did I know?

It's not just because, as the Big Five Personality Test I just took informed me, I have a low "Agreeableness" score. It's because of the critical rigor.

And the author does call it a novel in the link Allen provided:

So I began thinking about trying a novel. I had had an old man’s voice in the back of my mind for a long time. One that I felt I really knew. It was a lot like my great great Uncle Cleve Marshbanks’ voice. He would be a hundred and twenty by now if he was still alive. He wasn’t educated (unlike just about everybody else in my family), had quit school in the sixth grade and gone to work. He lived with his sister, my aunt Eddie, who was one of the first women in Greenville to go to college. Anyway, it was sort of my uncle’s voice that I began with. The more I wrote in his voice, the more it felt right to me. Comfortable, relaxing and I felt something open up. One thing that helped a lot was using humor. With the fiction, I felt freer to find the humor in situations and to perhaps see that even when a family is in crisis, good things can happen, opportunities are created, family can get to know each other in new ways.

Okay Brian, the guy isn't exactly David Foster Wallace, but he's probably not going to be hanging himself in a closet anytime soon, (baring him over-reacting to your dismissive write-off of the guys labor of love. )

Making quality art out of Alzheimers or other forms of reality perception difficulty or mental illness is indeed possible and common. (see the film "Leaving Her" with Julie Christie, read Crime and Punishment or Moby Dick etc.) although much more common in hack made- for- TV movies of the week etc. or novellas. I don't think you can fairly make a blanket statement like you did.

In conceding that this book is a "labor of love," you have effectively consigned it to a subliterary status. Real literature comes from tortured souls incapable of love in any recognizably human sense. Real writers are neurotics, social outcasts, deviants, misfits, pariahs, and ne'er do wells.

If you will read my post carefully, you will see that I readily admit that many forms of mental disabilities/diseases/disorder have clear literary potential. Schizophrenia and paranoia have been richly mined by the postmodern set. Steinbeck and Faulkner produced memorable exemplars of what was then called mental retardation. No one is mentally ill in Crime and Punishment, and what I assume you are interpreting as mental illnesss in Captain Ahab is better interpreted as ambition: he wants to understand and kill the world's whitest whale. What's so crazy about that?

As for Alzheimer's, I stand by my claim: it destroys literature as light does darkness.

To:
One of These Days
I didn't put the issue of race in the novel. Hays did. I just noted that he did. Have you read the book?
As for black thugs, I'm just as enraged and angered as you are, but I try to do something about it by working with black youth rather than spewing hateful, anonymous comments on a blog.
I'm enraged by white thugs as well.

Brian, a few years ago a guy made a movie called "Momento" about a guy who totally lost his short term memory. ( a major symptom of the art-killing Alzheimer's) The protagonist had to write everything down and tatoo himself etc and because of this, the movie, in an attempt to simulate this and for reasons I still don't understand, was told in reverse. The movie was hailed by critics and considered high art. The director, Chris Nolan, was hailed as a genius. (He then went on to direct last summers Batman)

The blanket statement you are making about Alzheimers frankly sounds like something you are regurgitating from some type of writer's guide or screenplay instruction manuel although maybe you have had some kind of bad experience with Alzheimers?

Savage, is that the best you can do? The protagonist of Memento was given a very interesting mental disability--namely, the inability to sequence events in a causal structure over a period of time. Given that this capacity is the baseline of narrative itself--i.e. the causal linkage of events into meaningful sequences--the conceptual possibilities are indeed rich, and were further exploited in this film by the retroactive narration, which iterates another conceptually dense theoretical matter pertaining to narrative as a cognitive structure--namely, its deep retroactivity (we narrate after the fact, finding causes for effects we already know, although we use that structure to project into the future in an effort to predict the effects of causes we presently perceive as mere circumstances, and thus not-yet-causes).

So what you've proven, in gesturing toward art that doesn't involve an Alzheimer's victim, is precisely what I am suggesting: there are many other mental disabilities with far richer literary potential. In order to disprove this assertion, you would have to find (a) art with (b) an Alzheimer's victim. There are no such works.

As for my "regurgitating" from some kind of manual, you may as well say that a physicist is "regurgitating" from a manual on the relationship between mass and gravity. I have advanced degrees in this field; of course I know the basic facts.

Among which is that certain character types and scenarios are unavailable to art. If you plop an idealistic teacher down into a class of urban toughs, it is impossible that art will ensue. What will ensue is predicable and laughable: the toughs will come to understand that the teacher "really cares"; the principal will find his or her methods "unsound"; education will occur; important life lessons will be learned. Yawn.

Another example would be the wise old black man from whom the white character learns not to be racist. Mark Twain pulled this off in Huck Finn and it's gone downhill since, and so now you have dozens of wise old black men (usually played by Morgan Freeman) floating around the pseudo-artistic universe (usually inhabited by white authors and directors) handing out nuggets of moral wisdom to white racists. Then, they exit offstage, having performed their function: teaching white people how to be good by "recognizing the humanity" of their darker-skinned brothers. It looks like this book contains a variation on the theme. Yawn.

And so naturally it sells well. As Mencken said, no one ever went broke underestimating the taste of the American public.

One more question, Brian: Have you read the book?

Certainly not. The point, Allen, is that if your knowledge is advanced enough, you already know more about the book than people who have actually read it. This saves time and money.

With this book, for example, I already know how the structures of poignancy and bittersweetness will be organized around the figure suffering from Alzheimer's. I already know how the grammars of racial enlightment will accrue around the visiting repairman. I already know how the old man and the boy will overcome their antipathy to recognize unique and cherishable qualities in the other.

So why in the world would I want to actually read it?

Brian:
You're setting quite the example for your students.

Brian, I don't want to make you mad and I have the greatest respect for any fellow guerrillas fighting the good fight against the Evil N&R Empire of Politically Correct Fuddy-Duddyness, but in the case above you are either a.) putting me on b.) taken too much medication c.) are trying to give Connie Mack a run for his money d) were kidnapped and forced to watch some Movie of the Week about Alzheimer's Disease over and over again or e.):you need to
get into a Twelve Step program for pedants ASAP.

Allen, again you're missing the point. My students don't have the advanced knowledge. If they did, they have their own advanced degrees and would able to determine the difference between a book like this one and, say, Invisible Man, the book through which I will try to advance their knowledge in class tomorrow. The key here is knowledge, and its level of advancement.

Savage, you left out f.) all of the above, which is the answer my wife chose when I explained this thread to her. She says I should read the book before making such judgments.

So are you guys seriously telling me that the book ISN'T essentially what I've described? So far, I've seen no comments to that effect, only suggestions that my critical rigor is too rigorous, my level of certitude too certain. But in this matter (as in all others), I am willing to concede that there's an infinitesimal chance that I'm wrong.

You married well, Brian.

As for "advanced knowledge", life's for learning. We all started out watching Sesame Street or Mickey Mouse Club and thought it profound.

Brian,

Am I to assume that you do not care for books about life lessons learned through animals?

Instead of f) all of the above, I would say f) not doing enough jiu jitsu as a form of anger management which leads to all of the above

I feel bruised by this thread. Selflessly trying to advance knowlege according to my motto, "live for others," I find myself the victim of the first-time-ever Savage/Allen tag team, with axhandle and my own wife adding insult to injury.

Thank goodness you married well.