THE FREE-LANCE PALLBEARERS - ISHMAEL REED

Well, I guess that settles it, I’ll have to read all the Reed. And the motherfucker can write, there are dozens of novels, essays, plays, poems, collections he edited, saucy interviews, public speeches and anything else you can imagine. Even working my way through the novels is going to take some time, there are 13 listed on Wikipedia, with this title being the first, from 1967. Reed is really dialed in to what he’s trying to do in fiction right from the beginning. This novel, like all the other ones I’ve read so far, is less a traditional story than an all-out attack on any and everything. Reed takes absurd and funny situations, here it’s a society called and run by HARRY SAM (always capitalized) a Polish former used-car salesman who presides from a toilet thrown (what sort of toilet is the source of religious debate), pushes them to their extremes while constantly firing off far-out ideas, devastating critiques, historical insight, weird puzzles, oblique references and tons of jokes. He parodies various types of then-exigent political movements, from hippies to Black Power folks. he anticipates and critiques the woke-imperialism we seem to be stuck with now (at the beginning the main character Bukka Doopeyduk, is trying to be, “the first biological warfare expert of the colored race.” There is, of course, a revolution and lots and lots of references and allusions that I’m sure I missed. I was particularly fond of an ongoing obsession by a professor to push an enormous ball of dung around as part of his research for an academic paper entitled, “The Egyptian Dung Beetle in Kafka’s Metamorphosis,” and another subplot that revolves around a government programed called the “Mojo Power Retraining Act” which obviously plays right into one of Reed main obsessions, tracing, celebrating and highlighting African-American religious movements, counter-cultures, spiritual understandings and other occluded and persecuted elements in Black culture. With the same foresight he used to foresee and ridicule Woke-Imperialism, he also manages to make sure the critique is broader than just Black Vs. YT and includes a lot of references to the various Native genocides on this land. Reed also runs the Before Columbus Foundation, a group centered on indigenous issues so it’s interesting to see this concern present even in his first book. But despite all this, modern standards would highlight the lack of women and female perspective in this book. Otherwise, I see the Vonnegut connection and the Pynchon connection that he’s often saddled with. Vonnegut certainly in his fearlessness in taking a story in a bizarro direction while maintaining the political critique, tho I’ve never seen Reed get earnest and saccharine like Vonnegut tends to. In terms of Pynchon I think the influence runs the other direction. Only CRYING was published before this one and Pynchon references Reed in GRAVITY’S RAINBOW, writing “Check out Ishmael Reed. He knows more about it than you'll ever find here.” which is a pretty straightforward endorsement. They both mine the same paranoid shadow-Amerikan-history veins and mix this in with a total flood of strange reference points (both of them sort of predict the internet and the feeling of reading something while Wikipedia’ing what’s on the page), tho Reeds’ critiques include deeper racial components which, to me, makes them especially valuable. They definitely have the same yen for silly names (something in the pot back then?) and in this book, to give you a short sample based on a 30 second skim through (next time I’ll write down all the silly names as I go): Bukka Doopeyduk, M/Neighbor, F/Neighbor, Eclair Porkchop, J. Lapp Swine, Cipher X, U2 Polyglot, Arboreal Hairyman. #PynchonNames could easily be #ReedNames. Despite the issues of who should get credit for what, it is interesting to think about them side by side. Obviously, their respective races weigh most heavily into their disparate treatment (Reed is respected but not included in conversations of “greatness” the way Pynchon is), I think there’s also the fact that Pynchon is a famous on-the-lamb (is he in Mexico? California? Manhattan?) “recluse” while Reed is every stitch a public intellectual who will sound-off in interviews, support younger writers, found Foundations, critique other creators (another chance for me to bring up Reed’s play “The Haunting of Lin-Manuel Miranda”) which are both brave and do seem to make him real enemies. Finally, I wonder if the form is fucking up his reputation as well. Reeds novels, like I said before, are numerous, and they’re also pretty short. At 150-200 pages, I find them a nice little week of reading, a distilled shot of the Reed worldview, but they stand in contrast to Pynchon who takes decades to produce mammoth, all-encompassing works that, in many ways, are like 5 Reed books taped together. I wonder if creating shorter novels at a quicker rate was training critiques and academics to not look too deeply into any single volume since there’s always bound to be another. And maybe it makes his oeuvre intimidating to an outsider, where does one start? Interesting to consider but this book was awesome. He’s all the way there as a writer right from the beginning. If you like Reed, get you this. At some point I’ll have read all the Reed and will be able to place this one against all the others in a grand, unified theory of their relative values, but, until that day, I’ll have to let suffice that this one is excellent. 35 of those dancing Ghanaian pallbearers who were so popular on the internet a year or so ago who I couldn’t stop thinking about during this book.