Ed Pavlic

Who Can Afford to Improvise by Ed Pavlic is an accessible and far too rare form of literary criticism. Most critical books will tackle the works of the artist as works, be they novels, poems or whatever. The better works of criticism will also contextualize these works within the period in which they were created. Pavlic also brings an understanding of James Baldwin's work into active discourse with the present, a contextualizing within the period in which they are read.

This would be valuable for looking at any writer since one wonderful aspect of the literary arts is their ability to speak to different generations, different cultures and different historical periods. What Pavlic emphasizes here is the importance of "black music writ large" to Baldwin in both his life and his art. This lyrical aspect, as in music, is experiential in nature. If one also accepts that a reader, particularly an active reader, is also 'writing' the novel she is reading, then a work from 1963 can easily speak to life in 2016.

This volume is less a collection of essays about specific works than it is a playing of Baldwin's oeuvre with some riffing or improvising added as a way of contextualizing these works within contemporary culture. A type of call and response though that analogy is admittedly weak in my application here.

I reread some of Baldwin's books after I read this and found I had a much different interaction with them, almost exclusively from paying greater attention to voice first. I would highly recommend this for those interested in Baldwin, as well as applying that approach to other writers whose works seem to speak to you even when you aren't sure why.

Reviewed from an ARC made available by the publisher via NetGalley.… (mais)