One Woman Short - Softcover

Best known as a chronicler of hip-hop, Nelson George spent many years penning culture pieces for The Village Voice. No wonder One Woman Short suffers from a problem endemic to novels by critics--it seems to waver somewhere on the boundary between fiction and nonfiction, often resembling a piece of cultural commentary rather than an act of the imagination. Apt yet strangely disembodied observations disrupt the story ("The nineties, a time people once thought would introduce the paperless office, has in fact been a decade where more trees have been killed than ever before in history.") And Rodney himself sometimes appears less like a character and more like a symbolic figure--a walking, talking embodiment of various 20th-century American trends.

There's no reason, of course, why Rodney shouldn't be a relentless exponent of pop culture. Growing up African American in Los Angeles, we're told, he always felt "a missing character in Boyz N the Hood--one who stood firmly between Ice Cube's ghetto pragmatism and Cuba Gooding's collegiate aspirations." Still, his instants of emotional nakedness come when all this pop-cultural static falls away and he must confront his dying mother, her house lost to fire, her mind fading in a subpar retirement home. These sad moments truly compel the reader. And while Rodney would probably be an annoying flake with a wandering eye in the real world, it's to George's credit that he manages to become likable, and even intermittently tragic, on the page. --Emily White