S. R. O.

by Robert Deane Pharr

College-educated writer and waiter Sid Bailey slowly learns to drop his conventional lifestyle and adopt the behavior of the misfits at the Harlem welfare hotel where he lives

Genres: Fiction, African American

544 pages, Paperback

First published February 1, 1998

About the author

Novelist. Rediscovered in the late 1960s after an interrupted career, Robert Deane Pharr constructs a critique of the American dream and the African American community's ability to attain it. As a social critic, literary realist, and pioneer in the exploration of the mechanics of writing, Robert Deane Pharr stands as an exemplar for authors who followed him.

Reviews

[Eric Hudson · Rating 2 out of 5]

Sad page upon page of wasted potential! One demensional characters popped in and out of this book like roaches in a real SRO. The main charcter had the complexity of concentration camp soup. And the good characters like The Sinman and Blind Charlie were like treasures right under your feet, but just not unearthed.

I originally thought that it remined me of Leon Forest's Devin Days, but better. Nope equally bad, I'm just glade that at 540 pages this novel was shorter.

This made me really question my rule of finishing every book that I start. This was painfull


p.s
Sorry Leon, but what do I know? Write in Peace!

[Christian Lebogana · Rating 5 out of 5]

Seems to me that some of the people who have left reviews are not particularly interested in black life or black people. Oh, sure, a black person can write on occasion--can write on their own, for themselves--but this motive is the life of the story. It's the life and raison d'etre, and everything that ain't that, isn't even nothing. It's a waste.

How a character can be 'one-dimensional' in a nigh-constant state of perjury, contortion, struggle--at the very least, in shifting, variable states of perjury--I don't know. It's not the kind of thing you'd say of any of the men and women in most any of the Canto's of Dante's Inferno. Quite probably you'd say they're characters, and memorable characters at that. And all they do is suffer. Some of em at most come up out the grave and sink back it into, like a Wrath out of Wizard 101. Why that kind of short-sighted way of looking at things should hold here, with this novel, I can't tell--but these reviews, the essence and smack of them, is precisely the kind of sulfuric croaking that Amiri Baraka hacks at so definitely in "The System of Dante's Hell". I like that book--goodreads likes that book, if the ratings are right, and likes it better than this one--but I this is the better book. Of course, it's not a feel-good book. Many good reads aren't.

You might say you don't care much for Paul Laurence Dunbar's *writing*, but you can't hardly call his characters one-dimensional or stale. Shall I mention Faulkner? Because even though these characters are meant to be straight out of time, history, the world, yesterday, meeting them on the page, seeing them face to face, they're far-out. Really something else entirely. Maybe not so much alien as marvelous, in a convoluted way. That part of writing--that part that Baraka could spin but couldn't dig, that a Gayl Jones remembered and reiterated, and was forgotten for, in the process--that's what shines through here. To call it a Black American Classic would be a disservice to this book because then nobody would read the damn thing. One Invisible Man is enough. One Native Son is enough--but thanks for the Blueprint. This text here is as fresh as it was when it was written. I'm not even going to call it funky. It's spotless. Having been deserted, it is without rust--it has with it all the vigor and sheen that you find, and hardly expect, in Damascene Steel.

And everyone loves piecemeal. To say that the first 100 or so pages are good, the first and final hundred are good, and that the book sags because of its middle--sags because of the life it chronicles as life; I just don't know what to say. It's not a Frank Yerby novel--at that, it's not one of the little Frank Yerby novels you can knock out in a day. Newsflash: no Frank Yerby novel is like that. That book doesn't exist. What people expect of pulp fiction, of gamma ray paperbacks and cent zines, they bring to these texts--and it's frankly a shame that Norton has fed into that aesthetic in order to sell the novels in this series. It's tacky. Be Norton, not the New Yorker. What's worse, it's harmful. These are not lost scripts to Shaft 4. You're not going to get Rush Hour 5 out of ts.

If you demanded that slickness, that New Wave frisson of a Zola novel, you'd rightly be laughed out of the room--god as my witness, let you say it of the best of Balzac, or even a fine work by Flaubert. Maybe they'd all be baggy to you much the same--all we would know is that you have as little taste in France as you do America. Notice that I did not say that you're unfamiliar with one or the other, that you haven't had your experiences--the experiences must be dry. Not Martini dry, either: bone dry. Stiff. With black fiction, when a character is introduced, when a character lives under a condition, has a condition, when that life isn't an episode of Puff the Magic Dragon and can't be fixed by blowing rainbow dust up the ass of any number of your protagonists Horatio-Alger style, to oh, the book is a slog. People live too long, nobody dies fast enough, the dream of happily ever after starts effing up your siesta. 'Oh, the characters come and go, and go nowhere. No development.' Were it only that this TS Eliot had an Ezra Pound to keep the Wasteland trim--and TS Eliot TS Eliot. But this is not Eliot, this is not the Wasteland; this is not Prufrock, nor the practice range of the Bowmen of Shu. This is a novel written by Robert Deane Pharr.

The consistency of these characters, of the world that is very much a problem for them as much as it is any Columbia scholar, is a flaw, a failure, a fatal error that, with the right editing, the author could have avoided. Or molded. Or starved, cut down--trimmed. Had these men and women never been born--yes, that's the edit; had they ultimately been properly aborted from the start, you might have something to work with. Well, this kind of hygienic thinking was crummy with Crummell, crummy with the purity movement, and it ain't worth sticks today. In politics as it is in literature. It's no irony that one of the experiences I am reacting against--not at all coincidentally--is a social worker's. It is precisely this subject-figure, the social worker, that the Sinman defines by their very incapacity, their certified incapacity: in this case, to treat the novel seriously as a novel; because the novel is already like the well-intentioned (or good-intention-capable) junkie that cannot manage their life. Whose existence *is* managed; and really, at that, less so managed that tagged and tolerated. The social relations and their discomfitures, their antagonisms, as depicted in the text reproduce themselves in the reception and reading of the text, in the very act of interpretation and criticism--now isn't that something? I see Stanley Fish hawking down the Grapes of Zeuxis!

Anyway, I suppose that's enough cantankerousness. I'm only about halfway through this book, and I suppose I've been ib a realist-cum-decadent-cum-expressionist-naturalist binge for awhile. Mohamed Choukri, The Most Secret Memory of Men by Mohamed Mbougar Sarr, the rathe genre-contorting Nazi Literature in Americas. I'm young. I've been coming to terms with the world. It is ugly and beautiful. You find the beautiful in the ugly and vice versa, and sigh to find out that it's all in order. You can say its gross, and its distorted, all at once, and--well, yes. And that too is all in order. You don't have to understand how it works, you don't have to comprehend how it does so in its entirety--quite possibly you can't even pull it off, if Kant is worth his salt. That fact inofitself gets some people out of order, but what can you do? Maybe a social worker doesn't need to hear five hundreds pages of "these people are human". They know that, don't they? They're trained to know that. And it's not enough. Maybe it's not enough for the casual reader, seeker, either. But what does that really mean? What does that really tell us about their substance, the origin, the essence of their opinions? What they mean for the people like the characters in these books, who live and breathe in real life, who inevitably spawn, or help conjure, texts like these? I don't assume the best, but I won't point figures beyond the evidence provided here. I just can't be led to assume that these people receive more than two or three star treatment--and then you wonder why the books read like this!

To say that this book has helped me learn about life would be to overestimate it's value and impression upon me. People do this with the Bible. Everything was already there, in some way you already had the words--that's why the resonate so deeply by the time you find them on the page (call me a Platonist)--but what you lacked is the style. The sensibility to make it all congeal, to give it a rhythm, a reason: to really discover, not so much the mechanisms by which people operate or become convincing entities, but that they are operating, or malfunctioning at all, and that there are words for it: that is a real, observable phenomena, that has been seen in the past, and that you're not going crazy. This grounding effect is what is important in the novel, for me, and it is an accoutrement to the fantastic writing. To the laughing, to the teary-eyedness that comes from drinking from this well of living and seeing. Confronting evil--radical evil, and mere human fallibility--is important. It's an important part of growing up: having books like these that tell you, you aren't alone there, you're not as naive as you thought (or you have not been the first to be naive, you won't be the last--that you aren't naive alone, which raises mere naiveite to the dignity of thought, thoughtfulness, consideration), things and people really are just that crazy, is all very important. Maybe even beautiful, when it doesn't kill you. Because there are kids, today, who are indeed living this. Or coming into contact with people who have lived this. And they're probably scared--and they need this. This stuff helps, I think.

They probably don't even suspect that these people, these characters, straight out of books, are human. That is important. Native Son is a good thriller but it is not the best humanizer. It remains, by the end of it, too good a book. It does not lift the painted veil, but creates another one. It is the balaklava it was almost meant to be. That very particular kind of aestheticism, or pointedness, or what have you, is not here. That spirit is not here. The Spirit of this book owes more to John Oliver Killens than it does Richard Wright. It's humanistic impulse is dogmatic, consistent, in a way that Wright's fiction--even his non-fiction--does not emphasize; or, rather, manipulates, uses, drains for its libidinal and dramatic potency, but cannot really redeem, or perhaps justify. But--Scene 3, in this book, I think it is--the depiction of that very process which is alluded to in the main; the mystery of how J&J make it being so broke all the time--you have to care about people to care about that stuff. At first I too thought it was a slog. Much too slice-of-lifey. But then I realized that it's a life and way of living that I care about; that doesn't live too far from me--that I ought to be interested in, seeing that I will more than likely come into contact with it (again) soon enough. You can't just know that people like that live and survive at a distance. It's not enough. You have to care. You have to have a stake--hell, you have to be present. Get close; have been close, without knowing it so much. You have to literally meet a Jinny, to have wandered about and into one in your day to day life, to really dig that scene. If you don't dig it, you won't dig it; I personally think that's a problem, but to each their own. Not every negro of note, with a thought or five in his head, in poor conditions, a universe of poverty, what seems to be an almost never-ending abjection, *is a Bigger Thomas*. Hell, even the ones who do make it out--and the ones who don't--are not Bigger Thomas. I turn again to Gayl Jones because the creature of abject endurance, in that thriller-style in which Native Son is written; why don't we talk about her depiction of that? I mean if you're going to talk all this good about Toni Morrison and the Black Woman writing as a pheomena, as a Good-Thing-Happening, why not really let them have their day? Especially when the kind of radical politics, aesthetic, weltanschaaung of a Corregidora is right there in your face! Loving on you! Seeing through you and past you everyday! When it's precisely the sort of work that Toni Morrison edited, and helped cultivate: which was to her writing, career, work, what Sinclair Lewis was to Robert Deane Pharr's by his own testimony.

But I've been rambling. I'm not sad and my life is not sad--this book is moving, and there's a lot moving in it. That's a beautiful machine. It's colossal. It's a piece of work; no ornery craftsmanship, but a genuine kind of mastery, expertise. Something has been pulled off, here. And effort which few would take up. That few could. Which is an acquired taste, so it seems. I myself don't know that I could pull a book like this off, write it--but I don't know that I want to. I probably couldn't do scriptwriting for Euphoria: I don't know that *I would want to*. That's on me. It's a nice thing to feel understood and even to be understood, but the first step in bettering yourself is getting over yourself. This text gives you the perspective you need to do that. 500 something pages and incredibly light on itself. Not wistful; not a morass either. But lucid, riveting: on-track. Sid is nothing but that perspective and drive and hope for others. That they get over themselves. When it seems he 'gets through to' or 'touches the life of' most of the characters, anyway, that seems to be the effect. They hope again. Loss lasts as long as its opposite. Glass half full half empty sort of situation, I guess. That they dream--for once? Again; at all. Without being wistful. They might fail themselves, fail him: but even that is apart of the process--is the essence, the substance of having tried at all. Too Kierkegaardian, too Fichtean for the cynics, maybe--not for me. I just can't believe a thing like this has been written. What a testimony to the human spirit.

good book you should read it

[Martin · Rating 3 out of 5]

This book is 544 pages. The first hundred were great as we were introduced to the S.R.O. called The Logan. The last hundred pages were great, as we/our hero ventured further away from The Logan. The middle two-thirds of the novel, however, became repetitive. I lived in a place like this in college in the 1990s, not an SRO, but definitely a drug den where there were very few boundaries and the denizens were enmeshed and reactive to the hilt. As a social worker, I've treated countless men (and a number of women as well) who live in SROs around downtown Los Angeles. Even though this novel was published in 1971 (and takes place circa 1963-65, as evidenced by the reference to Kitty Genovese), the characters and situations were very true to life. Unfortunately, it's a an exhausting kind of life. The life of an addict is very repetitive. There are a lot of interesting characters, but they become irritating over time. There is occasional philosophizing about the lives of addicts and prostitutes which can be pretentious of the philosophizing characters, but somewhat profound of the author. If the book could have been a little condensed, with maybe a few of the characters combined, it would have been better. Even if it were edited down to 400 pages, it might be better known than it is today. I believe the author was somewhat of an iconoclast. I would love to know if he lived a life similar to the one portrayed here. When you are writing a ficitionalized account of your life, it is sometimes hard to know how to keep it interesting for the uninitiated. I loved the setting of the Morningside Park area of Harlen, which is my favorite park in Manhattan, and the area's uneasy relationship with Columbia University up the stairs. All in all, I would say this is more of a 'hang out' book, since that's mostly what the characters are doing. Unfortunately, I couldn't really put it down for even a week without losing track of some of the many residents coming and going from The Logan, so I ended up pushing myself through it quickly, when possible.