Crabcakes: A Memoir

I read Crabcakes almost right when it came out, because Jim McPherson is a writer I greatly admire, and because he was my teacher and friend at U of Iowa while I was there.I used Crabcakes as a text in my Sophomore English class at U of I, and generally people had a negative reaction. It was slow, plodding, confusing, and over-philosophical. It was also obscure in meaning, place, and time. Some students refused to finish it, and others came to class angry that they couldn't understand it.When I first read it these were my reactions as well. However, I decided to use the book in class because it eventually came to rest securely with only a handful of works that I didn't enjoy reading: stories I only came to appreciate later. Many of the most engrossing novels I've read don't have the staying power of some of the most difficult, and such has been the case with Crabcakes.McPherson's often convoluted sense of pacing, and his involved sense of meaning (that spans cultures, continents, and languages) was a pretty big project to get through, but once I was finished I couldn't stop thinking about it for a long time.This is the best of art, the kind of creative endeavor that puts me in awe--when someone has an intensely personal vision and manages to communicate it with such accuracy that, for a time at least, the world looks different.I highly recommend this book.

Crabcakes follows an action taken(McPherson's impulsive purchase of a Baltimore rowhouse at auction because he sympathisized with the plight of its tenants) through the unexpected results on his life for years afterwards. His reflections make you pause and consider ripple events in your own life. "Etiquette Necessary for Survival on Secondary Roads" is brilliant.

James Alan McPherson, the author of two of the greatest short story collections of the postwar era, Hue and Cry (1969) and Elbow Room (1977) ends tewnty years of book silence with a moving, illuminating memoir of his journey from personal isolation to acceptance and understanding of community. We meet some memorable characters, Mrs. Channie Washington, the narrator's tenant, who always enclosed a small affirming note with the rent check, Ira Kemp, the dreamer and former co-worker of McPherson's as a railroad waiter in the early 60's, who became a lawyer and argued a case before the Supreme Court, Howard Morton, McPherson's neighbor, who looks out for him, while carrying for his own invalid son, and several Japanesse friends, who teach the author "religio," neighboring or binding. McPherson's quiet humor, dignity, and clear human insight make this a book of continual surprises, recognition and beauty. In answer to the question who in the world would you most like to have dinner and conversation with, some would say Thomas Jefferson, Einstein or Rembrant. My answer: I'd like to eat crab cakes with McPherson.