A review by larryerick
Lost in the City by Edward P. Jones

4.0

This book caught me a bit by surprise. First, it gets promoted as a collection of stories about black Washington, DC. It is that, but, especially in the early stories, it is very subtle about making that an obvious part of the setting. This is no Manchild in the Promised Land, oozing with black urban milieu. A Beltway resident may catch some of the street references, but the rest of us will not see any typical DC tourist locations. These are regular folks living "regular" black urban lives. Secondly, the author is quite restrained in his narratives. There are no linguistic gymnastics embellishing what is happening. He describes people and situations very clearly, letting "behavior speak louder than words." Finally, and it took me a while, but I found the stories quite female-centric, coming from a male author, as they do. All but a small number of the stories center on female characters, and even the ones that concentrate on a male character, have extremely important connections with key female roles. The author is obviously very in tune with the central role that women play in the urban black community. He doesn't criticize. He doesn't praise. His women -- and in some cases, young girls -- are nuanced personalities holding the community together in the only ways they know. Sadly, if this collection was about white soccer moms in the suburbs, it would be an easy best seller, but it's not. It's about people lost in the city and lost in American society.