Title:
I
Can't Wait on God
Author: Albert French
Publisher: Doubleday & Company, Incorporated
Date Published: September 1998
Hardcover, 208pp.
Told over the course of five summer days and nights in 1950, "I
Can't Wait on God" pursues the themes of beauty, humility, and what is truly precious
in our lives, with a story of crowded joys and familiar despair set in post-World War II
Pittsburgh.
From Publisher's Weekly:
Publisher's Weekly:
A Spoon River complex of subplots and vignettes spills out of five summer
days in a Truman-era Pittsburgh ghetto in French's elegiac third novel (after Billy and
Holly). French introduces dozens of characters in this relatively short work, some for no
more than a few pages. This large cast serves as a backdrop for two slender, essentially
unrelated story lines that emerge from the cyclical rhythms and harsh details of
back-alley life. Willet Mercer and her boyfriend, Jeremiah Henderson, strike out for New
York with a bankroll and a Buick that belonged to a pimp she has murdered, but she insists
that they first head for North Carolina to find the child she abandoned years ago. The
second story concerns Mack Jack, a saxophone player who fears he has lost his musical
ability. French poignantly captures Mack's frustration as he wanders the neighborhood in a
stoic daze, trying to get his nerve back. The vignettes are skillfully drawn--whether of a
minister who wears his "preachin suit" to his job cleaning downtown offices
because he "wants folks to see who he is before he changes into his cleanin
clothes," or of a rooster doomed one morning by its "kiss-my-ass-look."
Sometimes the novel's sprawl of anecdote threatens to overwhelm the main plots (and the
minor characters are sometimes more vivid than the protagonists), but French's mixture of
nostalgia and horror ultimately makes for an evocative work that, alternately brilliant
and melodramatic, brims with life. (Aug.) FYI: A paperback edition of French's Vietnam
memoir, Patches of Fire, will be published simultaneously by Doubleday.
