American Rhapsody

April 25, 2016
Pierpont’s (Roth Unbound) colorful portraits of writers, actors, and musicians including Edith Wharton, James Baldwin, Katharine Hepburn, Marlon Brando, Nina Simone, and George Gershwin, among others, offer a kaleidoscopic mural of America’s cultural coming-of-age in the early to mid-20th century. In spite of the book’s disjointed nature, though, Pierpont’s shining prose provides some bright and memorable moments. Hepburn, she declares, overcomes many obstacles to present us with an image of strength: “We held her close not because she could act but because of the insistent life that hummed through every taut and peremptory inch of her.” Dashiell Hammett turns “inarticulateness into a style” and seeks, even more than Gertrude Stein, to strip writing down radically to its essence. Gershwin’s music endures because of his vision of the ways that music brings people together: as he wrote, “music always repeats the thoughts and aspirations of the people and the time.” Both Bert Williams and Stepin Fetchit use their comic genius to turn the ugliness of racism into a painfully hilarious commentary on American life in the early 20th century. Though each of these characters is interesting in her or his own right, Pierpont doesn’t tie them together in any convincing manner, nor do her profiles offer us much in the way of new readings of their lives and work.