Divine days

Fabulous, wildly comic, and Ulysses-like, Divine Days explores the mythical world of Leon Forrest's literary kingdom, Forest County. It is a huge oratorio of the sacred and the profane, set in bars, churches, and barbershops over a crucial seven-day period in the life of would-be playwright Joubert Jones during February 1966. Divine Days creates a profound microcosm of African-American life. It is the most prodigious literary creation since Ellison's Invisible Man forty years ago. Joubert Jones - playwright, journalist, bartender, lover - confronts and transcends the power of a fantastic group of bar denizens whose personalities run the gamut of classical myths, Shakespearean heros, Shakespearean villains, religious true-believers, and ghetto dwellers. Joubert is evolving a memory from the yeasty material of his friend and mentor Sugar-Groove into a play. Sugar-Groove is a world traveler, a mythical lover, who has twenty nicknames connected with his prowess. He is trickster-as-angel. Joubert's volatile and fragile girlfriend, Imani, is desperately searching for her abandoned siblings, a meaningful self-definition of her Blackness, and a place to settle her warring spirit. Joubert also encounters the powerful presence of his Aunt Eloise and the ever-haunting phantasmagoric W. A. D. Ford, the demonic trickster and manipulator of bodies and souls. Ford is the Mephistopheles of Forest County, and he comes to represent the forces of cosmic evil in the world. The neighborhood of Joubert's imagination becomes a theater enraptured with the voices of the living and the dead, acted out in Aunt Eloise's Night Light Lounge. The critic John Cawelti has called this novel: "the Ulysses of the South Side." In the tradition of Joyce's Dedalus, Ellison's invisible narrator, Bellow's Augie March, and Heller's Yossarian, Joubert's voice emerges clearly upon Divine Days's ebullient stage.