!Click Song

by John A. Williams

At lunch in a restaurant on the East Side, Cato Douglas, a black novelist, learns that Paul Cummings, a white Jewish novelist and a friend for thirty years, has just committed suicide.

Genres: Fiction, Race

430 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1982

About the author

John Alfred Williams was an African-American author, journalist, and academic. His novel The Man Who Cried I Am was a bestseller in 1967.

His novels are mainly about the black experience in white America. The Man Who Cried I Am, a fictionalized account of the life and death of Richard Wright, introduced the King Alfred Plan, a fictional CIA-led scheme supporting an international effort to eliminate people of African descent. This "plan" has since been cited as fact by some members of the Black community and conspiracy theorists.

In the early 1980s, Williams, and the composer and flautist Leslie Burrs, with the agreement of Mercer Ellington, began collaborating on the completion of Queenie Pie, an opera by Duke Ellington that had been left unfinished at Ellington's death. The project fell through, and the opera was eventually completed by other hands.

In 2003, Williams performed a spoken-word piece on Transform, an album by rock band Powerman 5000. At the time, his son Adam Williams was the band's guitarist.

Librarian note: There is more than one author in the Goodreads database with this name.

John A.^^^Williams

Reviews

[Robert Wechsler · Rating 4 out of 5]

This first-person, fictional life narrative by an African-American writer whose work no longer attracts interest is told out of chronological order, the way someone would tell their stories if they weren’t writing a novel, but rather spinning tales over a period of time. Except that these tales aren’t spun. They vary from angry and violent to beautiful and touching. They just keep coming, with some repetition and a few that don’t work, but on the whole this is a powerful work that held my interest. I didn’t find it as amazing as Williams’ earlier novel The Man Who Cried I Am, but that is a hard act to follow.

[Nancy Frishberg · Rating 4 out of 5]

This is a book I had had on the shelf for many years! I probably bought it because it looked intriguing in a catalogue when I was still browsing print catalogues, marking up the things that looked good, filling out the order forms, getting the and crossing off a few items.

!Click Song is well-written, engaging and enraging. It's the story of a novelist, a WWII veteran from his young adulthood through the late 1980's; the war comes through in his nightmares. His friendships, family (or is it families?) and career as a writer and professor create a framework to hang American culture on during the 2nd half of the 20th century. Here American culture is viewed through a few lenses, such as New York City and the publishing business, his relationships with women and male friends, and do I need to say race? I guess I do. He keeps hoping that his work will be accepted without reference to his race, and we the readers, hope for a breakthrough also, but he knows and is shown repeatedly that it's impossible.

In case you think we've now entered the post-racial era, try this one on to see how it felt 20 years ago. Seems pretty much the same to me, but then I lived in NYC at least part of the time he was writing about.

Makes me want to pick up his other books.

[Ronald Wise · Rating 4 out of 5]

This one was well worth reading because of its literary style and surprisingly — since it was twenty years old — its relevance to the current mood in America. The narrative tone reminded me of Saul Bellow. The drama throughout the book stemmed from the apparent need of American mainstream society to limit Black prowess — intellectual, literary, or otherwise — to a sub-category of "African-American". As I read it, I continually thought about the difficulties certain parts of our society are having in accepting the fact that our current African-American president may possibly be the most intellectual, articulate, and persuasive we have ever had… yes, period. This novel came to my list from a mention of it by Nancy Pearl in Book Lust in her list "The Book Lust of Others" — it was a book recommended by literary figure Ishmael Reed.

[Kathy Weyer · Rating 2 out of 5]

I stuck with it, thinking it would get better. It didn't. The harping on how black writers were treated felt oppressive. The friendship didn't ring true, and his constant screwing around and unfaithfulness was just irritating. Having said that, the writing is good, but the book was, to me, waaaaaay too long and I lost the concept of most of the characters. IMHO, if the author had gotten rid of a lot of the minor characters and went deeper into the main characters and established a real storyline, it would have been better. Either that or I just didn't understand what the author was trying to relay.

[Ben · Rating 5 out of 5]

I believe I have come upon the work of the greatest forgotten American novelist of the postwar period. Absolutely genius.