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Another Kind of Madness: A Novel
“A full-bodied literary achievement bustling with sweat, regret, and sound.” —KIESE LAYMON Ndiya Grayson returns to her childhood home of Chicago as a young professional, but even her high-end job in a law office can’t protect her from half-repressed memories of childhood trauma. One evening, vulnerable and emotionally disarrayed, she goes out and meets her equal and Shame Luther, a no-nonsense construction worker by day and a self-taught piano player by night. The love story that ensues propels them on an unforgettable journey from Chicago’s South Side to the coast of Kenya as they navigate the turbulence of long-buried pasts and an uncertain future. A stirring novel tuned to the clash between soul music’s vision of our essential responsibility to each other and a world that breaks us down and tears us apart, Another Kind of Madness is an indelible tale of human connection.
- GenresFiction
504 pages, Hardcover
First published January 1, 2019
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120 people want to read
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Displaying 1 - 4 of 4 reviews
August 22, 2020
Compelling, wallowing through detail, attraction, amazingly believable characters, Chicago as its not fineness, Africa, why on earth was this added?, difficult going through 600 pages, it is sticking with me, and easy to read often dont, this book is not known.
Critics: Ndiya Grayson returns to her childhood home of Chicago as a young professional, but even her high-end job in a law office can’t protect her from half-repressed memories of childhood trauma. One evening, vulnerable and emotionally disarrayed, she goes out and meets her equal and opposite:
Shame Luther, a no-nonsense construction worker by day and a self-taught piano player by night. The love story that ensues propels them on an unforgettable journey from Chicago’s South Side to the coast of Kenya as they navigate the turbulence of long-buried pasts and an uncertain future.
A stirring novel tuned to the clash between soul music’s vision of our essential responsibility to each other and a world that breaks us down and tears us apart, Another Kind of Madness is an indelible tale of human connection.
As gun and police violence ravage so many U.S. cities, and gentrification pushes people out of their homes, veteran poet and scholar of African-American culture Ed Pavlić offers a debut novel that explores the displacing and dehumanizing effects of these forces. Chicago, specifically, which Pavlić renders in synesthetic rhythms, tones, tastes and colors to show how a person’s hometown codes their consciousness. At its best, “Another Kind of Madness” is a 500-page prose poem, and the heights it scales are worth the bumpy ride toward the boundaries of fiction.
Ndiya Grayson (pronounced Áh-ndiya, “soft like the opposite of ‘off’ ”), back home in Chicago for a paralegal job after law school, hesitates to settle into her new apartment, a “provisional, no-lease townhouse sublet” where boxes remain unpacked. Although the South Side projects she grew up in have been razed for development, she is constantly aware of the space they inhabited because of a traumatic attack that took place there when she was 12.
Traveling by bus to the old neighborhood, words signal memories through her “like a flashlight waving around underwater.” Ndiya presses on, slowly abandoning her new life to face the past. Pavlić has written extensively on James Baldwin, and here he embraces Baldwin’s belief in the value of facing one’s pain. Madness is about what can be found when you go back to the place you started from after it drove you away.
One thing Ndiya finds, despite her better judgment, is love. Shame Luther plays piano in South Side jazz clubs and works in construction at a job site called Joycelan Steel (Joycean, Joyceland?). The name points playfully at the book’s recursive structure, which echoes Joyce’s “Finnegan’s Wake” (although it’s far easier to read!) as well as Charles Mingus’ theory of rotary perception. Characters feed off one another like improvisatory musicians, and, like “Finnegan’s Wake,” the book begins at the end and ends just before the beginning.
The Joyce reference feels generous rather than obtrusive as it passes over the head of the unread but intuitive Shame, who initially thinks “Invisible Cities” was written by someone named Vintage Calvino.
Inserted in the Mingus-esque circles drawn around Ndiya and Shame is a troubled, shady character named Junior, who sticks to different parts of their past and future selves and disrupts the equilibrium. After a series of abusive encounters with Chicago police officers and a murder they try to pin on him, Shame flees to Kenya.
Critics: Ndiya Grayson returns to her childhood home of Chicago as a young professional, but even her high-end job in a law office can’t protect her from half-repressed memories of childhood trauma. One evening, vulnerable and emotionally disarrayed, she goes out and meets her equal and opposite:
Shame Luther, a no-nonsense construction worker by day and a self-taught piano player by night. The love story that ensues propels them on an unforgettable journey from Chicago’s South Side to the coast of Kenya as they navigate the turbulence of long-buried pasts and an uncertain future.
A stirring novel tuned to the clash between soul music’s vision of our essential responsibility to each other and a world that breaks us down and tears us apart, Another Kind of Madness is an indelible tale of human connection.
As gun and police violence ravage so many U.S. cities, and gentrification pushes people out of their homes, veteran poet and scholar of African-American culture Ed Pavlić offers a debut novel that explores the displacing and dehumanizing effects of these forces. Chicago, specifically, which Pavlić renders in synesthetic rhythms, tones, tastes and colors to show how a person’s hometown codes their consciousness. At its best, “Another Kind of Madness” is a 500-page prose poem, and the heights it scales are worth the bumpy ride toward the boundaries of fiction.
Ndiya Grayson (pronounced Áh-ndiya, “soft like the opposite of ‘off’ ”), back home in Chicago for a paralegal job after law school, hesitates to settle into her new apartment, a “provisional, no-lease townhouse sublet” where boxes remain unpacked. Although the South Side projects she grew up in have been razed for development, she is constantly aware of the space they inhabited because of a traumatic attack that took place there when she was 12.
Traveling by bus to the old neighborhood, words signal memories through her “like a flashlight waving around underwater.” Ndiya presses on, slowly abandoning her new life to face the past. Pavlić has written extensively on James Baldwin, and here he embraces Baldwin’s belief in the value of facing one’s pain. Madness is about what can be found when you go back to the place you started from after it drove you away.
One thing Ndiya finds, despite her better judgment, is love. Shame Luther plays piano in South Side jazz clubs and works in construction at a job site called Joycelan Steel (Joycean, Joyceland?). The name points playfully at the book’s recursive structure, which echoes Joyce’s “Finnegan’s Wake” (although it’s far easier to read!) as well as Charles Mingus’ theory of rotary perception. Characters feed off one another like improvisatory musicians, and, like “Finnegan’s Wake,” the book begins at the end and ends just before the beginning.
The Joyce reference feels generous rather than obtrusive as it passes over the head of the unread but intuitive Shame, who initially thinks “Invisible Cities” was written by someone named Vintage Calvino.
Inserted in the Mingus-esque circles drawn around Ndiya and Shame is a troubled, shady character named Junior, who sticks to different parts of their past and future selves and disrupts the equilibrium. After a series of abusive encounters with Chicago police officers and a murder they try to pin on him, Shame flees to Kenya.
June 14, 2020
On April 28, I heard the words of the critically acclaimed poet Ed Pavlic through a live session sponsored by Left Bank Books to promote Another Kind of Madness, Pavlic’s first novel. The session was moderated by Kiese Laymon, author of the phenomenal memoir, Heavy.
Before the session was over, I’d bought the book.
While listening, I made three promises to myself:
1. Do not make this into what I want it to be.
2. Do not anticipate.
3. Get lost in and appreciate the writing.
If so inclined to peer at publishers’ marketing, you would read Another Kind of Madness is an “indelible tale of human connection,” a story about Ndiya Grayson and Shame Luther (Pavlic enjoys taking these names to task), two lovers who stumble into each other and together; fall forward.
“Ndiya’s memories of time with Shame stood out like colorized scenes in a black and white film.”
That might be enough for some. But you’ve read that before.
But what do you expect when the poet takes the reins of the novel? Not only does Pavlic hold tight, he loosens, lets go entirely, miraculously grabs the reins … and lets go again.
Told in 5 books, each prefaced by an insightful yet shrewd Chaka Khan incantation, Another Kind of Madness then becomes a story unto itself; shape shifting yet remaining what it does best: captivate.
“Where ‘here’ is a verb that hurts. But it isn’t pain. Here is musical … breath in slow motion. Easy as this here.”
And I haven’t even gotten ‘there.’
Ndiya and Shame is not the story you were hoping for. That is, if you were hoping for some linear and binary path to salvation.
I could walk you through that.
Rather, Another Kind of Madness challenges your faculties as not just a reader but as a lover of language; emotive and expressive, full and throaty, as if more than two things can be true at the same time.
Lyrical intonation notwithstanding (Shame Luther is also a self-taught pianist); I am not a jazz-as-an-art-form enthusiast, yet it still washes over; a malevolent maelstrom skipping beats that, albeit in a different pattern, manage to land in the same vaunted spots they did yesterday; veering around sharp corners yet finding ways to leave me alone at my most lost-in-thought vulnerable, while at the same time granting that moment of peace I actually longed for.
“Try it, he thought. Then try again until you were out of agains, try to follow it around in the dark. There was no route. Nothing was ever empty.”
In Another Kind of Madness every gesture, every word, has its own melody; that when strung together create indelible harmonies. That if you too believe life is a song; each note a breath, then it is not to be taken lightly, or for granted.
Before the session was over, I’d bought the book.
While listening, I made three promises to myself:
1. Do not make this into what I want it to be.
2. Do not anticipate.
3. Get lost in and appreciate the writing.
If so inclined to peer at publishers’ marketing, you would read Another Kind of Madness is an “indelible tale of human connection,” a story about Ndiya Grayson and Shame Luther (Pavlic enjoys taking these names to task), two lovers who stumble into each other and together; fall forward.
“Ndiya’s memories of time with Shame stood out like colorized scenes in a black and white film.”
That might be enough for some. But you’ve read that before.
But what do you expect when the poet takes the reins of the novel? Not only does Pavlic hold tight, he loosens, lets go entirely, miraculously grabs the reins … and lets go again.
Told in 5 books, each prefaced by an insightful yet shrewd Chaka Khan incantation, Another Kind of Madness then becomes a story unto itself; shape shifting yet remaining what it does best: captivate.
“Where ‘here’ is a verb that hurts. But it isn’t pain. Here is musical … breath in slow motion. Easy as this here.”
And I haven’t even gotten ‘there.’
Ndiya and Shame is not the story you were hoping for. That is, if you were hoping for some linear and binary path to salvation.
I could walk you through that.
Rather, Another Kind of Madness challenges your faculties as not just a reader but as a lover of language; emotive and expressive, full and throaty, as if more than two things can be true at the same time.
Lyrical intonation notwithstanding (Shame Luther is also a self-taught pianist); I am not a jazz-as-an-art-form enthusiast, yet it still washes over; a malevolent maelstrom skipping beats that, albeit in a different pattern, manage to land in the same vaunted spots they did yesterday; veering around sharp corners yet finding ways to leave me alone at my most lost-in-thought vulnerable, while at the same time granting that moment of peace I actually longed for.
“Try it, he thought. Then try again until you were out of agains, try to follow it around in the dark. There was no route. Nothing was ever empty.”
In Another Kind of Madness every gesture, every word, has its own melody; that when strung together create indelible harmonies. That if you too believe life is a song; each note a breath, then it is not to be taken lightly, or for granted.
May 27, 2019
Strange, lyrical, powerful, elusive. Another Kind of Madness revolves around the connection between Shame Luther--pianist, laborer, street intellectual--and Ndaiya Grayson, Chicagoan returned to her native city years after a traumatic event that shadows the novel. Both Shame and Ndiya live in the depths where cause and effect blur into states that can't be directly translated into anything other than what they are--it's a love story but that doesn't really touch is. The narrative perspective is elusive, engaged in an ongoing call and response with the characters conceived in more conventional terms: images and vocabulary can't be tracked to a realistic source in the characters' lives, for instance.
If you're looking for an aesthetic point of entry, the later novels of Michael Ondaatje work as well as anything, but Pavlic's got a deeper sense of the African American music echoing through his characters' psyches. There are a couple of scenes echoing the cadences and silences in the conversation in part IV of Faulkner's "The Bear." But it makes at least as much sense to think of what it would be like to hear Thelonious Monk accompanying Chaka Khan.
The last two sections of the book, which take place primarily in Kenya and are presented in a radically fragmented chronology reflecting the state of Shame's psyche and Pavlic's take on time and memory, don't work as well for me as the first three. The silences and gaps are clearly intentional, but I'm not sure we have enough to feel the rhythms on their deeper levels.
If you're looking for an aesthetic point of entry, the later novels of Michael Ondaatje work as well as anything, but Pavlic's got a deeper sense of the African American music echoing through his characters' psyches. There are a couple of scenes echoing the cadences and silences in the conversation in part IV of Faulkner's "The Bear." But it makes at least as much sense to think of what it would be like to hear Thelonious Monk accompanying Chaka Khan.
The last two sections of the book, which take place primarily in Kenya and are presented in a radically fragmented chronology reflecting the state of Shame's psyche and Pavlic's take on time and memory, don't work as well for me as the first three. The silences and gaps are clearly intentional, but I'm not sure we have enough to feel the rhythms on their deeper levels.
October 6, 2019
Found it hard to follow the story as it was not in chronological order and the gaps in the story were hard to fill.
Displaying 1 - 4 of 4 reviews