Louis Edwards’s Second Novel
If you like writing that is selective about which
second-line parade it will join, you will like the work of Louis Edwards, a
native of Lake Charles who probably lives in New Orleans. If you have not seen or talked to a person
for several years in the Crescent City, you do best to be cautious about
identifying that person’s place of residence.
Let it suffice that Lewis Edwards lived quietly, at one time or another,
in this den of creative temptations without falling into literal or figurative
disgrace. That is an achievement.
Edwards’s first novel Ten
Seconds (1991) got better critical praise than many efforts by emerging
writers, because he used conceptual imagination and artistry to ensure his
story would not be handcuffed by stereotypes. Carl Schoettler’s review in the August 14,
1991 issue of The Baltimore Sun was
fair and sensitive to Edwards’s writing an aesthetically challenging novel
about a quite ordinary man. Like William
Melvin Kelley’s Dunfords Travels
Everywheres (1970) and Clarence Major’s Reflex
and Bone Structure (1975), Ten
Seconds was a fine piece of linguistic invention, indebted to James Joyce
but not overwhelmed by the Irish acrobatics.
If Bernard W. Bell, who wrote with keen insights about Kelley and who
devoted an entire book to Major, had chosen to comment on Edwards’s
postmodernism in The Contemporary African
American Novel: Its Folk Roots and Modern Literary Branches (2004), I suspect Edwards would be more frequently
discussed in scholarly circles. Perhaps
people who talk about Ronald Sukenick and Richard Brautigan also talk about
Edwards. If that is the case, his
readership is highly specialized.
Common readers, especially those who live in New Orleans,
might embrace his second novel N: A Romantic Mystery (1997). It is rich with street names, place names,
food habits, class attitudes ---the cataloging we know well from Arthur Pfister’s
My Name is New Orleans: 40 Years of
Poetry and Other Jazz. You can’t be more New Orleans-centric than
Edwards, who in a single paragraph on page 13 mentions Norbert Davidson, Kalamu
ya Salaam, James Borders, Brenda Marie Osbey, Tom Dent, Quo Vadis Gex, Keith
Woods, Beverly McKenna and the Calliope Project; a writer who has his main
character go to Community Book Center to purchase a copy of Jean Toomer’s Cane from Jennifer (page 131) is stone cold
New Orleans. Something very special will register for readers who lived in the
old New Orleans from 1960 to 2005. The
wealth of referentiality might mean little to readers who only know
post-Katrina New Orleans, the new city where organic charm has now been
commodified for the tourist industry. What will register for all readers,
however, is the murder of a young black male.
Such murder, unfortunately, is obscenely “normal” in New Orleans. That Edwards chose to use devices from film
noir and hard-boiled detective fiction gives what could have been a run-of-the-mill
urban novel an intriguing difference. If
any real life reporter tried to do what Aimée DuBois does about the crime, she
would cooling in a morgue. The magic in N: A Romantic Mystery is the skill
Edwards uses in creating fiction that is historical but not sociological. It is no accident that he dedicated the novel
to “Charles Bourgeois and Albert Murray ---les
gourous” or that most of the chapter titles are French: double entendre, les
femmes fatales, la descente, objet d’art, le petit déjeuner, Tante Aimée, le
fou, chez Strip, le cinema, la nature morte, Doppelgänger (a German slip), l’entracte,
le livre, la vie en rose, sang-froid, chef d’oeuvre, la niece, les morts ne
parlent pas, le pasteur, un coup de telephone, la resurrection de l’amour, vive
la difference, la letter d’or, and dénouement
(this final chapter rounds off the sections LES PROLOGUES, ACTE I: Mise en Scène,
L’ENTRACTE, ACTE II: À la Recherche du Temps Perdu. Edwards’s second novel is sufficiently
Louisiana African/American French to distinguish itself from the genre of
street literature. It is not ti negre; it is simply Black.
Jerry W. Ward,
Jr. June 11, 2015
