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White Pages
Kamal Jackson is a black novelist who has reached an impasse in his career. His work is either too white for black audiences or too black for white audiences. He decides to do something about it, in spite of the opposition he gets from his new love interest, Yasmin. Concocting a Caucasian-sounding pseudonym and a backstory to rival J. D. Salinger's, Kamal sets out to rework his most current novel for a new round of publishers. Kamal must now ask if he is prepared to sacrifice his relationship with Yasmin and his identity as a writer of color in order to see his project through to its uncertain conclusion.
220 pages, Kindle Edition
Published December 6, 2016
3 people are currently reading
14 people want to read
About the author
Ran Walker
62 books56 followersRan Walker is the author of four novels (The Keys of My Soul, B-Sides and Remixes, 30 Love, and Mojo's Guitar), two novellas (Beat Bop and Afro Nerd in Love), and two short story collections (Secrets & Cures and 16 Bars). His short stories and poetry have appeared in a variety of anthologies.
Ran is the recipient of both a 2005 Mississippi Arts Commission/NEA artist grant and a 2006 artist mini-grant, and he has also served as an Artist-in-Residence with the Commission. In addition, he is a past participant in the Hurston-Wright Writers Week Workshop and is the recipient of a fellowship from the Callaloo Writers Workshop.
In addition to writing, Ran is a songwriter and music publisher with ASCAP and 1/2 of the electronic soul production team Groovault. Groovault released The Liquid Dream EP in 2011 and continues to work with a variety of up-and-coming artists. When Ran is not writing books or composing music, he is working on his iPhoneography and storytelling skills.
Ran is an Assistant Professor of English and Creative Writing at Hampton University and lives in Virginia with his wife and much better half, Lauren, and his amazing little rockstar daughter, Zoë.
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Displaying 1 - 2 of 2 reviews
July 24, 2020
3.75 Stars
In a reading life, you will come across a novel that speaks directly to what you are going through. It is interesting that the power of a story can connect with a book that you read at the proper time. This is the case with White Pages by Ran Walker.
Kamal Jackson is a young black novelist that has reached a fork in the road with his writing career. He has published two novels to modest sales and written a third one he hoped would be his breakout novel. However, his literary agent dumped as a client and numerous publishers rejected the manuscript. Kamal's financial situation gets further complicated when he loses his adjunct teaching job at a local community college.
He comes up with a plan to refurbish his unsold third novel under the pseudonym of Kilgore Pickens. Pickens is an old white male writer from the state of Mississippi. Kamal imagines him in the same vein of William Faulkner. However, I immediately thought about Richard Ford while reading the novel. Kamal comes up with a biography and backstory for Kilgore Pickens. He resubmits the manuscript to one of the top literary agents in the NYC and gets signed as a client. The novel gets sold for a mid six figure advance and receives a lot of publicity with the mysterious Kilgore Pickens being a new white male southern novelist destined for literary success and recognition.
Well, the truth will come out about Kamal's pseudonym and the ramifications of the so-called deception. Walker makes some keen observations about the publishing industry regarding to diversity.
"The novel did not fit with what publishers (and maybe even readers) wanted from an African-American author. The acceptable subject matter for African-American authors, while making room for urban adventures; erotic dick-slinging, melodramatic love stories; slavery; and civil rights, did not seem to have a designation for stories that were set in Southern life in a way that did not revolve around race."
"Kilgore Pickens did not have to entertain such headaches. He was an older white man from Mississippi and could write anything he wanted, however he chose to do so. His offbeat characters and simplistic writing style would be viewed as evidence of his recently excavated genius. Even more, his unwillingness to embrace the spotlight afforded by independent and chain bookstores, as well as literary magazines and the larger writing community, would quietly allow him to absorb an air of the mysterious, antisocial, yet wise, white male writer."
Those two paragraphs hit home as a black writer. Unfortunately, many readers want to put you in a box and expect you write inside those parameters to be authentic to your ethnic experience. However, as a self-taught reader and writer and someone who has always march to beat of his own drum, you can not place my creativity into some neat box that can be easily digestible.
This comment from Kamal's love interest, Yasmin in the novel brings home a larger point for any creative person no matter their ethnic background.
“As an artist, your voice is all you have, and people have to take it or leave it, but we can’t compromise our vision just to make ourselves more ‘palatable.’”
Indeed. As a writer with a made-up fantasy world in Kammbia, I have to write authentically for the stories I want to tell in that world. That authenticity comes from living my adult life in South Texas and Northern New Mexico. The people I have met in my nearly three decades in both places have informed my fictional world of Kammbia. As a writer, you have to step into the elements that give your creative life passion.
I applaud Ran Walker for examining black identity, and how it affects the creativity of a writer. White Pages is not the best novel I have read in 2020. However, it is one the most important novels I will read this year. I'm glad that I found out about Walker from an email that I would have trashed immediately. Serendipity is at work here.
In a reading life, you will come across a novel that speaks directly to what you are going through. It is interesting that the power of a story can connect with a book that you read at the proper time. This is the case with White Pages by Ran Walker.
Kamal Jackson is a young black novelist that has reached a fork in the road with his writing career. He has published two novels to modest sales and written a third one he hoped would be his breakout novel. However, his literary agent dumped as a client and numerous publishers rejected the manuscript. Kamal's financial situation gets further complicated when he loses his adjunct teaching job at a local community college.
He comes up with a plan to refurbish his unsold third novel under the pseudonym of Kilgore Pickens. Pickens is an old white male writer from the state of Mississippi. Kamal imagines him in the same vein of William Faulkner. However, I immediately thought about Richard Ford while reading the novel. Kamal comes up with a biography and backstory for Kilgore Pickens. He resubmits the manuscript to one of the top literary agents in the NYC and gets signed as a client. The novel gets sold for a mid six figure advance and receives a lot of publicity with the mysterious Kilgore Pickens being a new white male southern novelist destined for literary success and recognition.
Well, the truth will come out about Kamal's pseudonym and the ramifications of the so-called deception. Walker makes some keen observations about the publishing industry regarding to diversity.
"The novel did not fit with what publishers (and maybe even readers) wanted from an African-American author. The acceptable subject matter for African-American authors, while making room for urban adventures; erotic dick-slinging, melodramatic love stories; slavery; and civil rights, did not seem to have a designation for stories that were set in Southern life in a way that did not revolve around race."
"Kilgore Pickens did not have to entertain such headaches. He was an older white man from Mississippi and could write anything he wanted, however he chose to do so. His offbeat characters and simplistic writing style would be viewed as evidence of his recently excavated genius. Even more, his unwillingness to embrace the spotlight afforded by independent and chain bookstores, as well as literary magazines and the larger writing community, would quietly allow him to absorb an air of the mysterious, antisocial, yet wise, white male writer."
Those two paragraphs hit home as a black writer. Unfortunately, many readers want to put you in a box and expect you write inside those parameters to be authentic to your ethnic experience. However, as a self-taught reader and writer and someone who has always march to beat of his own drum, you can not place my creativity into some neat box that can be easily digestible.
This comment from Kamal's love interest, Yasmin in the novel brings home a larger point for any creative person no matter their ethnic background.
“As an artist, your voice is all you have, and people have to take it or leave it, but we can’t compromise our vision just to make ourselves more ‘palatable.’”
Indeed. As a writer with a made-up fantasy world in Kammbia, I have to write authentically for the stories I want to tell in that world. That authenticity comes from living my adult life in South Texas and Northern New Mexico. The people I have met in my nearly three decades in both places have informed my fictional world of Kammbia. As a writer, you have to step into the elements that give your creative life passion.
I applaud Ran Walker for examining black identity, and how it affects the creativity of a writer. White Pages is not the best novel I have read in 2020. However, it is one the most important novels I will read this year. I'm glad that I found out about Walker from an email that I would have trashed immediately. Serendipity is at work here.
July 3, 2020
I would really love to see this made into a movie. I wanted a lot more detail from this book than I got. Particularly, I wish Kamal's different workplaces were more fleshed out with side characters, making the book longer. It would have been nice to spend a more time in the middle, marking time and having other people interact with him. He's a teacher, but we see very little of him teaching. Spending some time on students graduating, new students, colleagues would be a great way to show him with new people and showing time passing. There's a point where one character mentions a year has passed and it barely comes across as a couple months. I often cringe reading books about writers, because it's very meta. But this one (unlike a lot of others) has an interesting story, and a good point to make.
Displaying 1 - 2 of 2 reviews