Constructing a Nervous System

September 1, 2021

Journalist Cheung relates growing up in Hong Kong-- The Impossible City--after its 1917 reunification with China, traversing its rich identities while exploring her education at various English-speaking international schools, the city's literary and indie music scenes, and the protests against restricted freedoms. One of America's top pianists, MacArthur fellow Denk recounts his upbringing and training, clarifying the complexities of the artistic life and the student-teacher relationship in Every Good Boy Does Fine. As Drayton relates in Black American Refugee, she left Trinidad and Tobago as a youngster to join her mother in the United States but was angered by the contrast in how white and Black people were treated and by age 20 returned to Tobago, where she could enjoy being Black without fear. What My Bones Know reveals Emmy Award-winning radio producer Foo's relentless panic attacks until she was finally diagnosed with Complex PTSD, a condition resulting from ongoing trauma--in her case the years she spent abused by her parents before they abandoned her. Growing up fourth-generation Japanese American in Los Angeles directly after World War II, Pulitzer finalist poet Hongo recounts spending his life hunting for The Perfect Sound, from his father's inspired record-player setup and the music his Black friends enjoyed to Bach, Coltrane, ukulele, and the best possible vacuum tubes. Winner of a Pulitzer Prize for criticism and a National Book Critics Circle Award for Negroland, Jefferson offers what she calls a temperamental autobiography with Constructing a Nervous System, woven of fragments like the sound of a 1950s jazz LP and a ballerina's movements spliced with those of an Olympic runner to explore the possibilities of the female body. In Home/Land, New Yorker staffer Mead captures the excitement, dread, and questions of identity that surfaced after she relocated from New York to her birth city, London, with her family in 2018. Vasquez-Lavado now lives In the Shadow of the Mountain, but once she was a Silicon Valley star wrestling with deep-seated personal problems (e.g., childhood abuse, having to deny her sexuality to her family) when she decided to turn around her life through mountain climbing; eventually, she took a team of young women survivors up Mount Everest (150,000-copy first printing).

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Starred review from February 7, 2022
Pulitzer Prize–winning critic and memoirist Jefferson (Negroland) refashions her nervous system into a “structure of recombinant thoughts, memories, feelings, sensations and words” in this bold and roving work. As most people refine their adult selves, she posits, they become calcified and set in their ways. To resist that—and instead “become a person of complex and stirring character”—Jefferson plunges deep into her “raw intimacies,” memories, and the histories of Black artists who have nurtured her creative and critical self throughout her life. Reflecting on her early love of jazz singer Ella Fitzgerald and pianist Bud Powell—whose chords “blaze and blast through unsanctioned states of mind”—she ruminates on the ways their brilliance came up against society’s “firm constraints.” When contemplating Hattie McDaniel’s 1940 Oscar (“the first Academy Award nomination for our race”) for her role in Gone with the Wind, she wonders whether it was an “advance or setback” (settling on “both”). Most intriguing, though, is Jefferson’s self-aware refusal to write from a critic’s remove: when a discussion of Willa Cather’s writing tempts her to launch into lofty analysis, she interjects “STOP! Collect yourself, Professor Jefferson.” By inviting readers backstage, she creates a dance of memory and incisive cultural commentary that’s deeply and refreshingly personal. This gorgeous memoir elevates the form to new heights.

Starred review from January 15, 2022
The Pulitzer Prize-winning critic and memoirist returns with an inspired and unstinting examination of American class, culture, and personal memory. Jefferson, who won the National Book Critics Circle Award for her memoir, Negroland, moves beyond autobiography into a deeper excavation of music, literature, and personal memory, examining her role in American culture as both the influenced and the influencer. In Negroland, the author revealed the burdens of membership in a class of ambitious Black Americans, and she further details the impact on their children: "You were always calculating--not always well--how to achieve; succeed as a symbol and a self." Jefferson escaped into music and literature, finding artists who helped her move beyond rigid family expectations. Among the musicians she praises are Billy Eckstine, Johnny Hartman, Bobby Short, Andy Bey, Nat King Cole, Bing Crosby, and Ike Turner. Jefferson also pays fervent tribute to Ella Fitzgerald, whose incendiary talent flowered despite abuse, neglect, and immersion in a brutally competitive musical culture. Upon first meeting her, bandleader Chick Webb dismissed Fitzgerald as "too ugly." Three years later, Fitzgerald's rendition of "A-Tisket, A-Tasket" propelled Webb's band to the top of the charts. Jefferson brilliantly deconstructs Fitzgerald's version of that tune and how it echoed the singer's terrible years in an orphanage, and the author's fire for "the redemptive tumult of the '50s and '60s" is palpable. A chapter about her disenchantment with Willa Cather's The Song of the Lark due to its homage to White superiority is tinged with academese, and her meditation on Josephine Baker has a more distanced, elegiac feel and is weighed down by too many quotes. Nonetheless, Jefferson's unique perspective and relentless honesty and self-examination ensure that there's something worthwhile on every page. Devotees of Negroland will want to continue the dialogue with this top-notch writer. A dynamic, unflinchingly candid examination of the impacts of race and class on culture and the author's own life.

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Starred review from March 1, 2022

Jefferson's latest memoir (following her National Book Award winner Negroland) is what she calls a "temperamental autobiography"--a merging of memoir and criticism in which the Pulitzer Prize-winning cultural critic analyzes her life through the macroscopic lens of American culture. It is a thrillingly original personal narrative, interlacing Jefferson's family and recollections with her interrogations of the writers, musicians, and entertainers who have mapped, she says, "the neural pathways by which a vision of culture develops." Childhood memories of Jefferson's father's depression splice with her thoughts about the life of jazz pianist Bud Powell; a close look at Ella Fitzgerald's "sweat and heft" is juxtaposed with Jefferson's feelings about standards of beauty as a Black teen. Her admiration for Willa Cather's work is examined against the backdrop of Jefferson's writing seminars (she's a professor of professional practice in writing at Columbia) in which she taught primarily white college students. Jefferson deconstructs and then rebuilds "the stuff of memory and experience"; the best way to "be a critic of your own past," she writes, is to "dramatize it, analyze it, amend it accidentally, remake it. Intentionally." This slim volume is saturated with brilliance. VERDICT A fierce and fresh amalgamation of memoir and cultural criticism by one of the country's most compelling thinkers. Highly recommended.--Megan Duffy

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Starred review from February 15, 2022
Jefferson glories in words, linguistic mouthfuls like ""diaphoresis"" and ""oleaginous"" and playful glances at the ""recitatif of racial injuries"" and ""decorating deprivations."" Like a skilled embroiderer, she blends the multicolored threads of Black cultural life with memories of her past in a memoir that is impressionistic rather than chronological. In Negroland (2015), she chronicled her childhood of relative privilege and the contradictions of middle-class Black childhood in the 1950s and '60s. Here, Jefferson looks inward, reflecting on the Black icons who shaped her worldview. Jazz great Bud Powell was a ""genius monster"" driven mad by racism and addiction, the flip side of Jefferson's respectable father, a Chicago pediatrician who suppressed his own artistic yearnings. Teen Margo thrills at imitating a down-home Tina Turner, while the adult Jefferson acknowledges the ""fraught history . . . of how the Black bourgeoisie has used, honored, disdained, borrowed from and gone slumming in . . . the culture of The People"". Sweaty, ""portly"" Ella Fitzgerald, muscular Wilma Rudolph, and colonial fantasy Josephine Baker all reflect white American discomfort and disgust with Black female bodies, attitudes Jefferson assimilates but intellectually rejects. Jefferson is a critic's critic, turning her keenly honed analysis on herself, her family, and her class, while relentlessly interrogating the broader underlying context of white racism.

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