The Glint of Light

by Clarence Major

Mark Smith, is a sensitive thirty-seven-year-old environmental scientist of mixed race. He tries to come to terms with his mother's painful death as he goes through the stages of grief. Mark is also reassessing his relationship with his gay twin sister, Maria, a lawyer. After several failed relationships with women in college, Mark, while at his mother's funeral in Chicago, reconnects with his high school girlfriend, Christy, an artist who paints self-portraits. He now believes he has finally found true and lasting love, but the country's civil unrest and political division plague the opportunity at a second chance. Author Clarence Major has devised a powerful novel about the cumulative unease and random violence that grip American life and ask what we should do about it.

Genres: Fiction

328 pages, Hardcover

Published May 30, 2023

About the author

Currently a professor of twentieth century American literature at the University of California at Davis, Clarence Major is a poet, painter and novelist who was born in Atlanta and grew up in Chicago.
Clarence Major was a finalist for the National Book Awards (1999). He is recipient of many awards, among them, a National Council on The Arts Award (1970), a Fulbright (1981-1983), a Western States Book Award (1986) and two Pushcart prizes--one for poetry, one for fiction. Major is a contributor to many periodicals and anthologies in the USA, Europe, South America and Africa. He has served as judge for The National Book Awards, the PEN-Faulkner Award and twice for the National Endowment for The Arts. Major has traveled extensively and lived in various parts of the United States and for extended periods in France and Italy. He has lectured and read his work in dozens of U. S. universities as well as in England, France, Liberia, West Germany, Ghana, and Italy.

Reviews

[Margaret Eldred · Rating 4 out of 5]

The Glint of Light is about Mark Smith, a thirty-something year old black man, grieving over the recent death of his mother and coming to terms with his own life. The title words come from Anton Chekhov and are often interpreted as meaning a novel should show, not tell. But Major also uses them, as well as the words of Aristotle, Roethke and others, to argue that there is hope even in darkness.

The beginning of the book seems more descriptive than plot-driven, consisting mostly of Mark's feelings of grief and reminiscences about family history and his childhood. The novel becomes more engaging when he renews his friendship with his childhood sweetheart, a white girl named Christy. Now he has to deal with learning who Christy really is as well as his grief. There are no easy answers. And more darkness comes--from his difficult relationships with Christy and another old sweetheart, Françoise, from the death of an old friend, and from insults and a bombing in a trip to Nice, France.

As well as exploring how a person comes to terms with grief, the novel also explores another kind of darkness--the tenuous social position of an educated, upper middle-class black man in a mostly white society. Mark's mother tells him, "People are just people" (p. 180), but Christy's parents are uncomfortable around Mark. And in one scene when a woman sees him coming into a restaurant, she takes her purse off the back of her chair and puts it under her feet. As an educated, upper middle-class white woman, I have never experienced such things. But my educated, upper middle-class dark-skinned friends have. So the novel reminds us that prejudice in subtle forms still exists, even among educated people.

Major does not consider the challenges of life easy to solve, but he does leave his readers with a sense of hope. Three years after his mother dies, Mark revisits her and his father's graves. He sees a glint of light on the cemetery pond and accepts his mother's death. We don't know how his life will proceed, but we at last feel assured that he will manage.

[Sheila Griffin · Rating 2 out of 5]

A man in current times moves from Chicago to Sacramento for a job at a state environmental agency. His mom dies and he returns to Hyde Park for the funeral and to settle the estate with his twin sister. He meets up with his old girl friend from high school an thus starts the crazy part of the book. I enjoyed how the author wrote about the family and how they reacted to the death of their mom and each other but the last half of the book after his marriage and return to Sacramento was just to hard to relate to .

[Kkraemer · Rating 4 out of 5]

A good, average man lives a good, average life in which some uncomfortable events occur: his mother's passing, his wife's infidelity, tension with his sister. Life events that are both predictable and upsetting, but the good, average man takes them in stride. He moves forward at a reasonable, measured pace. One step at a time. A good man.

He tells the story in flat brushstrokes, which cause the reader to provide depth: forefronting some incidents, burying some in the back distance, rewording the declarative sentences used to report this good, average man's life.

Utterly brilliant

[Tess Collins · Rating 5 out of 5]

“The Glint of Light” is a poignant and elegantly written chronicle of a man’s grieving process following the loss of his mother. Clarence Major intertwines longing and reflection with a profound understanding of the human experience. His exquisite prose delicately captures life's mundane, extraordinary, and fleeting moments—an easy, thought-provoking read into the evanescent instants that shape one’s existence.

[Rilla · Rating 5 out of 5]

The author paints a portrait of America in the Obama years, but the book’s concerns are timeless: the loss of a mother, sibling rivalry, the search for love, the ever-complicated forces of race. This is a beautifully rendered Chekovian tale of love and loss revealed through the accumulation of keenly observed ordinary detail. The novel is compelling, the characters memorable. It stayed with me long after I'd closed the book.

[Lauren Davis · Rating 5 out of 5]

Major is a much-lauded author ("Dirty Bird Blues" is now a Penguin Classic), and his latest novel lives up to his reputation. "The Glint of Light" is a powerful novel of our challenging, violent era.