Juice!: by Ishmael Reed - Movie Review, Music Review, Book Review ...

Juice!

by Ishmael Reed

Rating: 3.7/5.0

Publisher: Dalkey Archive Press

You would think that after more than 40 years of representing the minorities, outcasts and the downtrodden in American society, both in his fictional work and as a fervent independent publisher, Ishmael Reed would be a little tired. Luckily for readers, the world keeps on doling out injustice, so at 73 years old, Reed is still as pissed off as ever. Though his newest novel Juice! tackles subject matter that will be familiar to anyone who has picked up a book by Reed before - much of his output has focused on issues relating to the mistreatment or vilification of African-Americans - the narrative style is an entirely different beast. Scattered, surreal, tangential and falling somewhere between fiction and non-fiction, Juice! shows the man firing on all cylinders without a care for who gets in the way.

Though Reed is interested in exploring the hypocrisy at the core of modern America's cultural politics, surprisingly, Juice! doesn't spend too much time (at least not directly) on the election of Barack Obama or even the mishandled crisis in New Orleans while it recovered from the devastation of hurricane Katrina. Instead, he turns his attention to the murder trial of O.J. Simpson, an event that took place more than 15 years ago but still, as he points out, remains one of the most significant examples of racial imbalance in America.

Juice! follows the psychological wanderings of Paul Blessings, a fiery, controversial African-American cartoonist (an obvious stand-in for Reed himself) who becomes addicted to consuming every detail of the Simpson trial. As his coworkers and family members watch the trial unfold, they, just as the public, are convinced of his guilt. Blessings isn't so sure though. He insists that Simpson is innocent and that he's just another black man being given an unfair trial, aided by a massive conspiracy involving lawyers and police officers in an attempt to incarcerate a high-profile black man. As his obsession overwhelms his life, he must confront his own theories about racial inequality and whether or not we really live in a so-called "post-race" America.

On the surface, Juice! rehashes many popular arguments and opinions that suggested Simpson's innocence. Reed presents facts about tainted evidence, gloves that don't fit and all-white juries (some of which may be fictional in order to further represent Blessing's obsessive madness) as if they were as common as the nutritional information on a box of cereal. Though the book feels a little too derivative at times, harping on the one-note idea of Simpson as the pinnacle of racial oppression, Reed delivers the material with enough fluidity and raw power to make every page feel like a visceral call-to-arms against injustice. Blessings accuses the media of honing in on the trial and presenting a skewed view of the facts; he even goes as far as to call the trial the most public lynching of a black man in quite some time.

For the most part, the plot of Juice! is a mere afterthought; following Blessings through his controversial run as a cartoonist during the Simpson trial doesn't hold much interest, and at times this is a hindrance to the overall success of the book. It's hard to connect with characters when they are given so few lines of dialogue, as most only make a brief appearance before Blessings gets back to his own self-involved thoughts. Reed's prose is strong enough that many plot points are rendered unnecessary, instead choosing to move along at a brisk pace from one tangent to the next. Even though the main plot is centered on an event from 15 years ago, the connotations that Reed draws from that event are as relevant as ever. As Reed states through Blessings, "...in the American subconscious, O.J. Simpson represented all black men."

It's this kind of thinly veiled and deeply rooted racism that Reed targets and slices up with an uncanny precision. In Reed's world, no one is safe: "Bernard L. Madoff was accused of swindling his clients out of $50 million dollars, raising the worst anti-Semitic stereotypes of the thieving Jewish bankers, just as Richard Price's Lush Life, Steven Spielberg's The Color Purple and David Simon's "The Wire"... raised the worst anti-black-male stereotypes about incestuous, misogynistic, drug-dealing black men." He throws around these cultural excisions with ease, but their power is undeniable. Though Juice! doesn't have the same narrative intensity as some of his earlier writings, it would be erroneous to call this a minor work. Every chapter takes hold of your preconceived notions about race, politics and gender and turns them on their head. Juice! is a scattered tangle of ideas, but when the cultural observations are this poignant, it's bound to get a little messy.

by Kyle Fowle

Source: http://spectrumculture.com/2011/07/juice-by-ishmael-reed.html

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