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A review by mattdube
Amiable with Big Teeth by Claude McKay
3.0
This one was a swing and a miss for me. I really like McKay's poetry but had never read his prose, and this seemed fun, the story of an Ethiopian ambassador trying to raise funds in Harlem to repel the fascist invasion of his country and in the process leading to lots of chaos, possible scams, etc. From the description, I was hoping for something madcap and slightly zany, like Cotton Comes to Harlem. only a couple decades earlier.
But McKay's novel lacks that cynical verve that Himes has in spades, and this book is filled with a lot of speeches. Most of them are actual speeches, because we are at fundraisers, rallies, etc, but boy are there a lot of them. The primary conflict concerns the efforts of the Popular Front of the Comintern tries to co-opt African-American culture in Harlem, and I suspect this is a really accurate portrait of that struggle, if that's your jam, kind of like Orwell's writing on the Spanish Civil War. But dramatically it's pretty inert, and even when it hints toward something of narrative interest, like the "real" background of Maxim Tasan or the true nature of the Ethiopian ambassador's provenance, nothing much comes of it. It's too bad, because you can feel like there's a really great, antic novel in here someplace, but McKay doesn't pull it off.
But McKay's novel lacks that cynical verve that Himes has in spades, and this book is filled with a lot of speeches. Most of them are actual speeches, because we are at fundraisers, rallies, etc, but boy are there a lot of them. The primary conflict concerns the efforts of the Popular Front of the Comintern tries to co-opt African-American culture in Harlem, and I suspect this is a really accurate portrait of that struggle, if that's your jam, kind of like Orwell's writing on the Spanish Civil War. But dramatically it's pretty inert, and even when it hints toward something of narrative interest, like the "real" background of Maxim Tasan or the true nature of the Ethiopian ambassador's provenance, nothing much comes of it. It's too bad, because you can feel like there's a really great, antic novel in here someplace, but McKay doesn't pull it off.