Divine Days: A Novel

Forrest County

by Leon Forrest, Zachary Price (Preface), Kenneth W. Warren (Foreword)

A virtuosic epic applauded by Stanley Crouch as “an adventurous masterwork that provides our literature with a signal moment,” back in print in a definitive new edition

“I have an awful memory for faces, but an excellent one for voices,” muses Joubert Jones, the aspiring playwright at the center of Divine Days. A kaleidoscopic whorl of characters, language, music, and Black experience, this saga follows Jones for one week in 1966 as he pursues the lore and legends of fictional Forest County, a place resembling Chicago’s South Side. Joubert is a veteran, recently returned to the city, who works for his aunt Eloise’s newspaper and pours drinks at her Night Light Lounge. He wants to write a play about Sugar-Groove, a drifter, “eternal wunderkind,” and local folk hero who seems to have passed away. Sugar-Groove’s disappearance recalls the subject of one of Joubert’s earlier writing attempts—W. A. D. Ford, a protean, diabolical preacher who led a religious sect known as “Divine Days.” Joubert takes notes as he learns about both tricksters, trying to understand their significance.

Divine Days introduces readers to a score of indelible characters: Imani, Joubert’s girlfriend, an artist and social worker searching for her lost siblings and struggling to reconcile middle-class life with her values and Black identity; Eloise, who raised Joubert and whose influence is at odds with his writerly ambitions; (Oscar) Williemain, a local barber, storyteller, and founder of the Royal Rites and Righteous Ramblings Club; and the Night Light’s many patrons. With a structure inspired by James Joyce and jazz, Leon Forrest folds references to African American literature and cinema, Shakespeare, the Bible, and classical mythology into a heady quest that embraces life in all its tumult and adventure.

This edition brings Forrest’s masterpiece back into print, incorporating hundreds of editorial changes that the author had requested (but were never made) when the book was picked up by W. W. Norton after a disastrous warehouse fire destroyed most of the inventory from the original printing of the book by Another Chicago Press.

Genres: Fiction, Historical Fiction, Literary Fiction, Classics, African American, Literature, American

1168 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1992

About the author

Leon Richard Forrest was an African-American novelist. His novels concerned mythology, history, and Chicago.

His first novel, There is a Tree More Ancient than Eden, was published in 1973, and included an introduction from Ralph Ellison. Nobel Prize Laureate Toni Morrison served as publisher's editor for There is a Tree More Ancient than Eden, and his next two novels The Bloodworth Orphans, and Two Wings to Veil My Face. These three novels were known as the Forest County Trilogy. He cited Charlie Parker, Dylan Thomas, William Faulkner, Eugene O'Neill, Ralph Ellison, and his parents' religions as inspiration.

Reviews

[Jonathan · Rating 5 out of 5]

At one point, late in our conversation, Sugar-Groove said: "Look Joubert, there is a river of time, more ancient than Eden, where every form of waste and wonder has been discarded, past all parchments of recorded time. You enter, or I should say you’re tossed adrift or hurled into those turbulent waters to make a way out of no way even out of nothingness. Tossed off. Told to swim. Sail even. Get lost. Or Die. You have to teach yourself to swim through all this ahistorical garbage, to remake yourself against the temperament of the wrinkled, rowdy river. Occasionally you happen upon a divine spring of renewal, but don't count on many of 'em. You didn't ask for any of this, but you get all of it — more waste than wonder. Always another agony bed in the river to brook."

And

"Oh, conflicted me...
Not Du Bois simple-formula of double-consciousness, but rather one of a hundred hog-headed cheese voices of madness from my literary genesis. I am contorted between the voice in Finnegan's Wake: "You were bred, fed, fostered from holy childhood up in this two easter island...and now, forsooth, a nogger among the blankards of this dastard century, you have become a twosome twiminds forenenst gods, hidden and discovered, nay, condemned fool, anarch, egoarch, hiresiarch, you have reared you disunited kingdom on the vacuum of your own most intensely doubtful soul." Despising the parts, and fondly horrible home to parts of the sum...the nightmare of my history...and nowhere finding help in Cinderella...And on the other hand... "Deep in the festering hold thy father lies/of his bones New England pews are made/those are altar lights that were his eyes." Oh those tempest-like haunting words echo in Hayden's Middle Passage."



To be reading this in the time of #blacklivesmatter and all the pain that that movement expresses, was a deeply moving experience.

You will have difficulty with this novel if you read it with the assumption that there is a narrative thread in it buried under a mound of digressions.

The tales told are not digressions. They are the Things Themselves. The Oral, the mythical, the "wild-tale", are the words the subaltern speaks.

To only follow one voice is to do injustice to the others, is to limit, shut out, dismiss, curtail, ignore.

If you read another wild tale of bar-room antics as just another wild tale of bar-room antics, you may well find this book a slog.

This is not to say that the tale of Sugar-Groove and Ford and the Bloodworth clan fails to unfold throughout in wonderful twists and turns and reveals of mythical, soap-style brilliance.

Eden was wild, free-form Jazz, Orphans and Wings brought an element of self-control, Divine holds that song steady, then (like Roland Kirk playing multiple instruments at once) brings in the Blues and R&B.

Leon Forrest is one of the great writers of 20thc America, and this extraordinary book is one of those that certainly benefits from being worked-up-to. Yes it can, at times, be almost as hard going as Miss Mac, but if ya made it thru that 'un, ya 'aint gonna have no problems here.

Forrest's solution to the problem of racism - one that focuses on the shared, the conjoined, the mixed, the human - is powerful and persuasive.

A playlist comprised of songs mentioned and quoted in the novel (and what a fantastic playlist it is!):

Nature Boy - Nat King Cole - https://youtu.be/Iq0XJCJ1Srw
On a Monday - Leadbelly - https://youtu.be/CVivEeORtuc
Potato Head Blues - Louis Armstrong - https://youtu.be/udWB3OKV9_k
Outskirts of Town - Ray Charles - https://youtu.be/4cdP99R2tQE
Gloomy Sunday - Billie Holiday - https://youtu.be/KUCyjDOlnPU
Sugar foot stomp - Louis Armstrong - https://youtu.be/OpmcanGouw4
Meeting at the building - Leadbelly - https://youtu.be/LTEeZWnxDf8
My Man - Billie Holiday - https://youtu.be/IQlehVpcAes (what a performance in this vid!)
How I got over - Mahalia Jackson - https://youtu.be/l49N8U3d0Bw
Reckless Blues - Bessie Smith - https://youtu.be/GNfgW5cIWT8
I'm so proud - The Impressions - https://youtu.be/4a26b580Z3k
I know I Got religion - The Staple Singers - https://youtu.be/VZPh7U5IB14
God Bless the Child - Billie Holiday - https://youtu.be/Z_1LfT1MvzI
***********

LEON FORREST: Sure. I was out to write the great American novel. Not the great black American novel.

MILLS: But is built into that a desire or a need to appeal to a literary establishment that is overwhelmingly white? In other words, this isn’t a book for the folk.

FORREST: Well, no, but it’s about the folk all over the place. I write, I must say, for serious readers. And those serious readers might be in black Baptist churches, they might be in synagogues. I don’t have any problem, because I’m a blackAmerican, so I would expect that I would appeal to a broad range of people. I certainly never have been Afrocentric in that sense.

I am always searching for ways in which I can take the richness of the black experience, the folk material, and project it to the highest levels of thought, of sensibility and creativity. I like to think that I try to do more with the ranges of black voices – as much as any writer.

But I also must remind myself that I’m a novelist. So I go and hear a sermon by a black preacher, I don’t wanna simply turn on the tape recorder and imitate what he’s doing. I wanna take it to another level. And it’s in taking this to another level that we are enriched by literature, by art.

Don’t forget, the slaves and the blacks after slavery mingled their experiences with the stories of the Jews and their struggle in the Old Testament, and the story of the New Testament. This is how we got Negro spirituals. Nobody ever puts down Negro spirituals because they’re talkin’ ‘bout “Go down, Moses… Let my people go.”

********

MILLS: Here again, I’m not an Afrocentrist, I’ve just been thinking a lot about that line of thought. If we talk about Shakespeare, whom you allude to often, definitely with love – Does Shakespeare belong to you?

FORREST: Oh sure. All those people belong to me. That’s our Western library. I would say that it’s in Shakespeare where you find the greatest, probably, psychological and spiritual development of characters. Therefore I must read him. That certainly would be true with the great Russian writers.

Also, with the Russian writers, you have so many of the problems we face. The whole idea of the relationship of Europe to the Russian sensibility. Russians were fighting like hell in the 19th century about “How much are we Westernized?” and “How much are we Slavicized?” Certainly the idea of an oppressed people, the idea of a Russian soul struggle, which was an argument over “Who am I spiritually, intellectually and emotionally?” That’s very much like our battle.

Young people are very much caught up with Malcolm X. My God, that’s his story – a soul struggle, who he was spiritually, intellectually, racially. This was thought out not only in this country but in the Slavic countries. So you can be enriched by the experience of other people’s battles, and you can find the techniques to help you with your own struggle.

Obviously the issue of racism is a particular one for we of African descent. So I may not look to European letters for that; I know about that. (laughs) But I wanna know about other things. …

And the whites don’t have any problem [with this]. I mean, they’re expropriating our stuff all over the place. Some of my white friends that have a large jazz collection, larger than many blacks, I can’t say, “That’s not your music, that’s mine.” It came out of a culture that I came out of, but jazz now belongs to everybody.

And as we’re seeing now, blues belongs to everybody. And that’s black as you can get. But you go in these clubs in Chicago, 75 percent or more of the people in there are whites, young whites.

MILLS: And there are people who resent that, too.

FORREST: Yeah. A lot of people say, “Well, do they appreciate it?” Well, I don’t know, but they’re paying their money, they’re sitting there listening to it. And I’m sure the black blues musicians are glad to have anybody."

********

“I want to look at the work. I don’t care if its white or black. I don’t agree that “If you’re white, you can’t write”. I want to see what they can do. I also don’t believe that because I am a man, I can’t write about women. I had better quit writing, if I can’t write about women. Why can’t women write about men? It’s talent that’s important.”

***********

“I had been reading Ulysses quite closely, and I was influenced by jazz, of course, and the two seemed to be working together to open me up, to free me to try even more imaginative romps,” he said, describing the years dedicated to writing Divine Days. “I was on this horse, and I dared not get off.” He stayed on the horse for seven years, until the manuscript weighed in at 1,829 pages. When Marianne read it, she told her husband he should split it into three books. Forrest did not agree. He wanted this work to land with a mighty thump.”

*********
Byerman: I want to ask you about the idea of the voices in Divine Days. One of the things that struck me in reading through the book is that, while the characters are very different and their stories are very different, their voices seem to have a lot in common; that is, there seems to be this piling on of language and the playing with language (all the puns and other types of word play). Many of the significant voices in the text have this in common. Is there some sense in which they're all simply your voice?

Forrest : Oh, no, not at all. I mean, I hope that each has his/her own coinage, but I obviously am attracted to certain kinds of characters who evolve in my artistic imagination who are great talkers, and there is a kind of tradition of an orchestrated oral tradition, in which you start off with A, move to C, move to E, and then come back and pick up B and D. That has to do with the way jazz moves, and the folk sermon and just general storytelling. …

*********

So, yeah - one of those big brainy books that belongs on your shelf with those of Gass and Gaddis and WTV and all the rest. And, like JR, the relevance of this to our contemporary society has, if anything, increased since its writing.

Put simply, you should be reading Forrest. He deserves your time.

[Nathan "N.R." Gaddis]

“Simply put, Leon Forrest's massive masterpiece Divine Days is the War and Peace of the African-American novel.” -- Henry Louis Gates

Naw, more the Ulysses thereof. I'm fond of naming stuff the Ulysses of stuff. It is big though. 1135 by page count ; which brings it in a little under those other behemoths, Miss MacIntosh, W&M, etc. Like them two and much unlike the IJs and AtDs of the world, no one's heard of it. Or him. Listen, this novel even burned. Yep, that true first edition from Another Chicago Press burned up nearly the whole run in a warehouse fire. This the Norton first ed I got here is inscribed. Pretty slick, no?

At any rate, the going wisdom makes this brick even just a little more intimidating in terms of occupying your reading schedule. See, there's an introductory trilogy you'll want to have read first (forgone conclusion you'll want to read these Divine Days) :: There Is a Tree More Ancient Than Eden (the prose pyrotechnics will likely scorch the rest of your library) ;; Two Wings to Veil My Face ;;; The Bloodworth Orphans. Of course you needn't ; but they all get themselves connected together (primarily set in Forrest County) like what I hear ole Faulkner did with his unpronounceable county. As for DD, it takes some commitment certainly. Not as much pyro=sparks flying around (except when a few select characters get themselves rolling you see a few of those sparks teasingly start to singe your shoelaces) ; but there are voices, many voices, and a whole lot of story and a lot of jawing a lot of barbershop chat and basically just a lot of human beings doing what humans being do in Forrest County.

Well then so just to wrap this thing up (DD deserves a dissertation not my little thumbs=up) you should know that if you like to just sort of hang out in a novel without any pressure to get somewhere or sharpen your point or whatever but just want to relax and roll with the riffs and don't mind that someone's mind might be wandering a hair well then just you pull up your favorite reading chair and just turn off the rest of the world a while and see what all's going on up there in ole Forrest County.

[Ronald Morton · Rating 5 out of 5]

(There's a pretty big caveat that makes up the end of this review, if you're just looking at the star rating)

But my problem was more complex; my is hounded by the voices of oral tradition, literary tradition.

From the opening pages, Divine Days is embroiled with voices. To begin, the voices are only by reference; the narrator, an aspiring playwright, makes repeated claims to being afflicted by (composed of) voices (the claims are made in reference to both his youthful acting and his more recent attempts at writing). But, as the narration in the opening pages unfurl, the prose itself is overrun by myriad voices; giving proof to the voice-visited claims of the narrator, as the book is first person (journalistic really) throughout, and yet manages to pack a legion of voices into its pages. It is overwhelming - at least I found it so - to begin, as the narrative is pulled down multiple paths, through frame-tale-nestled digressions, where past and present share space with little regard to chronological progression. It is a lot like Forrest's earlier trilogy, but with a more stripped down prose. Essentially it pares away the more symbolic poetry of the earlier books, while retaining the fierce intelligence, and unrelenting complexity and difficulty of those works. And it's huge, and it earns its hugeness.

So, to specifics, not just initial impressions.

That opening chapter finds the narrator, Joubert Antoine Jones, back home in Forest County after a two year army stint. The opening paragraph directly states: "I’ve even mentally mapped out my schedule for the first seven days. If I can hold to my plan, generate a regular journal, and then use it as a springboard for my dramatic ventures, I’ll be on my way to fulfilling my quest." - the reference to the scheduled seven days are significant, as the entirety of this book - historic digressions aside - takes place over the course of those seven days. And while the narrative threads appear to be nothing more than a tangle in the opening pages, Forrest masterly gathers the threads as the book progresses into one cohesive whole; a whole that was on display all along, merely obscured in the telling.

Also.

The terms legend/legendary and myth/mythic repeatedly show up in the text, which will be familiar (at least thematically) with readers of the first three Forrest books. Forrest's prose is informed by - and enveloped by - tall tales, myths, parables, and the oral tradition. The last in particular drives his focus on voices, and the importance of the chorus, of the voice of a group of the whole, to make up the fabric of the tale. He's not just attempting to regurgitate myths and legends though, he's attempting to highlight the myth and developing legend of the day-to-day, and he accelerates this process by populating his book (populated mostly by reference and absence, but still ever present) with characters like Ford and Sugar-Groove.

But. BUT.

This is my conflict over how I feel about this book.

There were large stretches of this book where I did not enjoy reading it. That's not a content thing - there are no stand out chapters that put me off - it's more that this book is exhausting, and there were moments where I just wanted to give it up. Here, at the end, I find myself exhilarated, but I think that's more from the closing arc than the book as a whole. This is a book that I can see being totally off putting to some, and a paragon of form and beauty to others. Forrest is huge - his authorial voice and presence - but he's so damn huge here that he overwhelms; his scope and ambition are daunting, and in turn so is the book.

I guess what I'm saying is that I had to dedicate a great deal of time and energy into forcing myself to read large swathes of this book, and kind of resented having to do it. On the back side I'm awed and impressed by the scale of the work and what Forrest accomplished, but I'm glad to be done, and this will likely never be revisited by me.

I'm also likely judging this work based on its place with Forrest's oeuvre: he continues to return to themes and ideas (myth, music, literary impact on culture/society, the inescapability of the impact of religion; particularly in southern culture) and moves a great number of these themes forward through this work. I'm not sure if I'd rate this book as highly (or even have found the energy or patience to push through it) if it hadn't been for what all came before it.

So. This is a great book; an important book. But I hated it a bit. I loved it as well. But. But. I'm not sure which is the more valid.

[Kevin Adams · Rating 4 out of 5]

What an incredible achievement. A tad overwritten but I was riveted by everything Joubert said. Perfect storytelling from Leon Forrest. I can’t wait to read more by him.

4.5 ⭐️

[Paul Dembina · Rating 2 out of 5]

I'm a sucker for these literary behemoths (i.e. with > 1000 pages) and yet again I've been disappointed. Following on the heels of other mega-books such as theMystery.doc and The Adventures of Mr Marigold we have this 1100-pager.

Set over a week in Feb 1966 it's narrated by aspiring writer Joubert Jones, recently returned home to the US after a stint in Germany with the military.

He either tells or is told various anecdotes about characters associated with his family and/or hometown. The problem for me was the sheer length and repetitiveness of these stories. For instance if I had a £1 for every time the Nat King Cole song "Nature Boy" was mentioned (with lyrics) I'd be well sorted.

I was also put off by the concerns with theology/religion as these don't really interest me.

Although I did make it to the end it was definitely a struggle.

I never learn though - I've also pre-ordered Miss MacIntosh, My Darling - I hope I find that more engaging

[Derrick · Rating 5 out of 5]

After being out of print for a while, Seminary Offsets is publishing this in February!!!! Highly recommend all of Leon Forrest.

“During the course of transforming his life, I personally hope to discover a meaning of existence out of this man’s divine days upon this planet.”

This, says our narrative guide, Joubert (pronounced Jew-Bear) Jones, on the first page of Leon Edwards tome that he modeled after Ulysses. Divine Days action is set across a 7-day period instead of the single day as in Ulysses; Divine Days is also rampant with linguistic homages to Ulysses, Faulknerian turns (Yoknapatawpha county= Forrest County), many Shakespeare references (pretty much all the major plays), music and pop culture references (Greta Garbo, Nat King Cole, Ray Charles), political/social figures (Malcom X, MLK), Greek and Yoruba(n?) mythologies, and, of course, The Good Book.

The quoted sentence that prefaces this review is in reference to the mythically unmythical legend of a man, Sugar-Groove, that Jones is trying to write his play about. That is basically what happens over the next, 1,134 pages of Divine Days, Jones recalls his experience with SG or hears other people's stories about SG. These tales range from laugh-out-loud funny to ugly-crying tragic, all situated between and around and through linguistic pyrotechnics ranging from crass toilet humor to strings of wordplay to alliterative character names to re-worked cliches and turn of phrases to re-purposed canonical lines.

One just has to take the dive and read it for themselves. This book is on par with the best of the best of literature. I hope this book finds a wider audience one day. THE most slept on American novel, because I believe it has unique observations in a unique form. In my head canon of American Novels It’s up there with Mason & Dixon, Gravity’s Rainbow, and Moby Dick. If you can get a hold of it, do.

I’m looking forward to reading Forrest’s other novels. The chance that I may like them even more than this novel is exciting.

[Jesse · Rating 5 out of 5]

DIVINE DAYS holds a high honor in my mind: unlike many obscure novels that receive incredible praise and hyperbolic lamentations for their unjust invisibility among literary circles, Leon Forrest's monumental 1992 novel deserves every laudatory comment it has received in the past 30 years. Readers with a wider vocabulary than my own will forgive me for the following chain of vague descriptors as I try to convey the glory of DIVINE DAYS's construction and Forrest's prose: mythical, folkloric, biblical, oratory, sprawling, kaleidoscopic, historical, invigorative, infuriating, tragic, transnational, transethnic, transtemporal, expansive, polyphonic (one of those buzzwords, like Künstlerroman, that I usually roll my eyes at yet is perfectly applicable to this novel), and, above all, Black. Crafting a barrage of characters who cover seemingly every facet of the varied yet communal experience of African American life -- from those who pass as white to spy on racist organizations to those who preach Pan-Africanism and denounce race-betrayers; from those who hunger for their African roots to those who purposely abandon them; from Hebrews to Christians to Muslims and all uniquely Black religious traditions between them; from practitioners of the Black Arts Movement to those who reject its Afrocentrism; from those who have amassed fortunes on fellow Black bodies to those who have been forgotten to the ghettos -- Forrest never shies away from exploring the truth of his existence and of the world he saw developing around him. This novel is awe-inspiring and, truly, deserves to be considered a monument of American literature, a voice for millions who had yet to be spoken for in such intensely profound ways in our Canon.

[Geoff]

Purchased. Perhaps an early autumn read. "The War & Peace of the African-American novel"? Yes please thank you ..

[Brent Hayward · Rating 4 out of 5]

In the mid 60s, Jew-bear Jones (Leon Forrest?) returns to Forest County (Chicago?) from a military stint in Germany. This seriously massive book documents minutia of the man's first week back in town: he aims to finish writing a play, called Divine Days, about a nearly mythological figure in the local community, Sugar Groove, who has now vanished; hook up again with his activist, troubled girlfriend; quit his job in his aunt's dive bar to move onto other, greater challenges... But there is a deluge of peripheral characters and memories, reams of conversations, flashbacks, larger-than-life tales and some unpleasant dramas from the past, retold and threaded throughout, and reflections on / because of racism (Leon Forrest, Joubert, Sugar Groove, and pretty much everyone in the book is black), resulting in a powerful capture of a young guy on the verge of a new stage in life, of an urban neighbourhood, or a mysterious disappearance, and of a time (MLK had just been assassinated). The manuscript could have used another copyediting pass and there is some repetition and even chunks out of place that I think are the result of unwieldily volume and writing tedium rather than desired effect by the author, but overall a book cadenced and structured like none I've read before.

[Aiden Heavilin]

Abandoned at page 260.

[Gerard · Rating 5 out of 5]

People had such difficulty dealing with chaos. And even more understanding of human complexity, especially their own. When it came to accepting the myth of ordering, we all were easily ordered. I had witnessed this during my stint in the military. We accepted any number of trouble tales soldered, or fused into one long-legged tale. Just give them a spiel, which sounds like a doctrine, and spread the new shit in the form of the Old Wisdom, and the people will go for it hook, line, and sinker.” - (DD 658)

Responding to a question about his magical seamstress storyteller Aunt Lenora Bell during a 1992 interview conducted at Leon Forrest’s Northwestern University office, “The Mythic City: an Interview with Leon Forrest,” Forrest in turn reveals key autobiographical details about his generational history that have been formative to the creation of his seminal work Divine Days:

She would talk about growing up in Kentucky and her family. One brother had owned, as she says, a saloon (she was very refined), and the other brother died when he was quite young. And then her mother, who was a mulatto, was part of a group of teachers in Kentucky. So she was not that far really from slavery. And then my great-grandmother on my father’s side - was born in 1875, and her mother had been born into slavery. And so even though I was born in 1937, I wasn’t that far from some of the stories that were either near slavery or at the frontier of it. And that’s perhaps one of the reasons why I got interested in trying to write novels that had a historical sweep to them…but in a mythical sense…since I wasn’t there nor were the people who I talked to really in the slave experience, but they knew of it. (76)

Leon Forrest’s intellectual pursuit of creating a sweeping historical novel in the mythical sense pervades his fourth, 1,140-page masterpiece that’s set in the folkloric Forest County. By acknowledging both his proximity and distance to the slave experience, Forrest writes with great clarity an epic novel rich with the spirits of his ancestors and the stories of transcending struggles passed down to him generationally. Joubert-Jones, the central character in the novel, has returned home from war in Germany. Raised by his Aunt Eloise who simultaneously motivates and undermines his writing, and emotionally plagued by guilt over the death of Hans-Hanson, who was a troubled young man with the potential for greatness, Joubert-Jones attempts to write a stage play across seven days (tons of Biblical references and allusions in this novel that I would love to write more about) titled “Divine Days.”

The dramatic personae located on the very first pages structurally blurs the boundaries between the novel and the stage. Weaved throughout the narrative include a wide range of perspectives; starting from the purple-haired barmaid Estella by Starlight to some of Joubert's former lovers such as Zelda Browning, an English Ph.D. student who accompanies Joubert to a Malcolm X rally, and even preachers such as Rev. Honeywood, the reverend of the First Temple of Divine Reckoning, who falls short of his own spiritual teachings. All of this is to say that Divine Days is a novel about the hybridity of the African American experience. By critiquing (or at least expanding upon) W.E.B DuBois’ idea of “double consciousness” throughout the novel, Divine Days provides an alternative to its philosophical limitations.

The core of his stage play concerns two juxtaposed larger-than-life trickster characters: the mythical folk hero Sugar-Groove and his diabolical counterpart, the Mephistophelian cult leader W.A.D Ford. Sugar-Groove and W.A.D Ford are the opposing mystical characters in Joubert’s stage play, but Forrest provides agency and room to expound all of the unique stories, tribulations, histories, and philosophical and political banter to the plethora of characters in Divine Days, which makes this novel such a unique work of art. The voices that both weave, sing, and transmogrify through Forrest’s novel range from the most painful sufferings of the African American experience, such as the 60+ million tortured Africans across the Middle Passage to the long-standing and rampant plague of racism in 20th-century America, but Forrest also touches upon humor and spiritual/artistic resilience in the face of mass suffering through the philosophical concept of “making a way out of no way.”

There’s also a more metafictional quality to the contrasting voices in the novel: heavily inspired by Ralph Ellison, W.E.B DuBois, James Joyce, Malcolm X, William Blake, Shakespeare, and Dostoevsky amongst many others, Forrest continually draws from a variety of literary, philosophical, and historical traditions in an attempt to elevate the African American experience and transcend his people beyond pure suffering.

One of the blurbs on the back of the novel compares Divine Days to the “War and Peace” of African American fiction. I often roll my eyes at such comparisons, but for me, Divine Days exists both as a unique work of its own merits while also similarly as historically astonishing as Tolstoy's tome, visionary as The Recognitions by Gaddis, and temporally experimental as Ulysses by James Joyce in its successful attempt to transform the everyday something extraordinary. Forrest masterfully paints a boundless, multifaceted, and complex universe of the African American ethos guided by the creative spirit of a brilliant artist. I highly recommend this novel.

Ford was reborn because he was in time with all affirming attributes with the nature of the universe; the evolving face of existence, reconnected to it - his dry bones possessed continually renewing life because he, the 'fact-finding Ford' was ever rejuvenated by his relationship to the expansive, monumental vastness of Time and Space - traveling through time and the rediscovery of his lost-found knowledge (was also the key to the survival of the human race) leaping light-years, as a hound to Heaven...he had the face of the universe buried within his own visage, so that 'with each discovery of a new planet, star, comet, solar system, even shooting star, within the vast galaxies of space, he was a constant reborn citizen of the Universe, in short. Each discovery was 'conscious-heightening,' he proclaimed. Standing before the blackboard now, chalk in hand, which he always used to give gravity and intellectual weight to his words as he etched out his profound sketches of our routes to paradise; the labyrinths of Hell. Yes and when this latest was delivered in a whispered voice, born of greatest intimacy, heads nodded all about Divine Days - 'Ah, yes, new Knowledge, additional and profound new wisdom, to add to the growing body of Fatha's Wisdom Literature.

[Kyle · Rating 5 out of 5]

“These souls, returned through voices, still maintain their spiritual essence, their old human meanness, their angularity, their roughhouse jagged-edged evolutionary claim and climb after the regenerative sources of the ladder up to life. Maintaining the drive to stay alive, they seek out those people who listen to them, who are hyper-aware, with antennae high and keen enough to hear their voices. They don’t seek to communicate, that most abused of modern words they seek to live. They throw their voices out there, as electrical charges, with the fond hope, or prayer, that some sonofabitch will pick up the vibrations, hook them up and run with their unharnessed spirits. For they are outlaw hitchhikers, with the spirit of hijackers, blessed with wings for stellar flight.”

Leon Forrest’s Divine Days is significant in many ways as the Ulysses of Chicago, but not just any part, but the South Side of Chicago (referred to as Forest County as an homage to Faulkner’s Yoknapatawpha County).

Chicago’s South Side has been known for far too long for gun violence, but the urban beauty to those streets is finally reflected here in Divine Days.

Chicago has long been known (if a bit underrated) as a city of literature, with writers such as Saul Bellow, Nelson Algren, Gwendolyn Brooks, Carl Sandburg, and Upton Sinclair, among others, but it has never had that one novel that reflected the experience that most people associate with Chicago today: the Black experience.

Readers who complain about the sheer length of the novel are unable to see the point of what Leon Forrest’s experiment in the novel is: a rare attempt to show that the language and slang of African American speech rhythms deserves the aesthetic merit to be treated on the same level as Proust’s French or Joyce’s Dublin Irish.

Joubert Jones is parkouring through the streets of Forest County over a week long period from February 16-23, 1966, and is struggling to capture in his notebook the soul of his mentor Sugar Groove.

Leon Forrest marshals the very resources of language itself in a virtuosic manner that turns African American Slang into a John Coltrane inspired Bayeux Tapestry Literary Jazz album: Ragtime stream of consciousness passages of Proustian length full of life, vitality, and spiraling subordinate clauses with page long riffs on race, history, Shakespeare, religion, Dostoevsky, Chicago, and the nature of Black identity itself.

“...my eternal dream: wouldn’t it be glorious to simply be able to tip-toe upon the roof-tops of time, and by reaching out my hand, possess the magical waving wand, at my finger-tips. Then to have the roofs of all the houses in the present, but particularly in the past, lift off and the stories of the most intimate cries and whispers of the heart be revealed to me. The echoes of the voices of all those buried in the underworld of time come vaulting up to me, with the essence of wisdom of the ages....”

Nat King Cole’s Nature Boy is the novel’s tender, poignant leitmotif as a direct counterpoint to Joyce’s usage in Ulysses of Love’s Old Sweet Song.

If Joyce’s Ulysses is an anti novel—then Divine Days is the anti-Ulysses, a Black counterpunch to the overly populated White male dominated narrative of the encyclopedic novel, such as Thomas Pynchon’s Gravity’s Rainbow, William Gaddis’ Recognitions, or David Foster Wallace’s Infinite Jest.

No longer should Black readers who struggle with “men of their time” arguments flimsily excusing pejorative usage of racist terminology in Modernist works such as Ulysses or The Sound and the Fury, feel uncomfortable with works of the High Modernist canon, because now...they have another one to count as one of their own: Divine Days.

...There was a boy...
...A very strange enchanted boy...
...They say he wandered very far, very far...
...Over land and sea...
...A little shy and sad of eye...
...But very wise was he...
...And then one day...
...A magic day he passed my way...
...And while we spoke of many things...
...Fools and kings...
...This he said to me...
"...The greatest thing...you'll ever learn...Is just to love...and be loved...in return...."

[Thomas · Rating 5 out of 5]

some smart guy called this book 'the war and peace of the african american novel' but it's really more of a big modernist thing like your joyce or musil or whoever. the style is much less prose poetic and biblical overall than his first novel, probably because this book is so long, but there are sections where that style breaks through again. there's not really a single overarching plot, but more a series of digressive stories that interact and move in and around each other, with the protagonist as a focal point. the book is so large and has so much in it that it's not really possible for it to be as consistently well crafted as his first book, and i get the impression that it wasn't edited much, but the high points are so high and the book so underread given how ambitious it is that i'm giving it 5 stars.

[Tyler Wing · Rating 5 out of 5]

the most deeply human book I have ever had the pleasure of reading. I could go on and on about this absolute behemoth, but nothing I could say would do it justice. if you've got the stamina and the dedication, I recommend you give this a shot. ttfn

[Em · Rating 5 out of 5]

Henry Louis Gates once referred to Divine Days by Leon Forrest as: "the War and Peace of the African American novel." I've also heard people reference it as similar to the impact of Ulysess by James Joyce. It's no wonder then that when I saw Divine Days is to be rereleased with a new cover I could not wait to read the advanced reader's copy.

Divine Days by Leon Forrest is a massive text with many voices. In it, Joubert Jones has returned home from service in Germany and has a goal to finish his manuscript of a play entitled "Divine Days" where he writes about a local mythological figure in the community called Sugar Groove. The story takes place in the 1960s in Chicago and is set across a 7 day period where as readers we journey along with Joubert and all of the characters he interacts with with working at his Aunt Eloise's bar.

Joubert is an interesting man who engages with the world with literary senses. Divine Days reads like a dream and as readers we are not sure what is real, what is imagined, what is mythological and what is based in memory. Joubert tells the reader: "I've been hearing voices all of my life...since before I can remember. Sometimes these incantations overtake me, speaking not only to me but through me and rendering me up frazzled and daffy."

This is a not a story that is told through a linear plot and it can be easy to get lost in the many different encounters you will make as a reader along the journey with Joubert. In some ways this can be disorienting and in others I think that's the point. There are many literary references made to Shakespeare, Faulkner, music and pop culture references (Malcolm X; Nat King Cole; Ray Charles) and lovers of literature will appreciate these aspects of the story. Overall, the cadence of this book is like nothing I've read before and I really enjoyed that. More than anything it was a refreshing experience to read a book with an almost entirely Black cast centered on Black life.

Thank you to the author and publisher for the e-arc copy!

[Matt · Rating 3 out of 5]

This book came very highly recommended. Skip Gates called it the War and Peace of the Black experience, Stanley Crouch called it a signal moment in American lit. I was interested, noticed that the book was out of print but after some digging I found a used copy for about 20 bucks. Definitely didn't know what to expect.

Quite a story, this is. Madcap, irreverent, postmodern, rowdy, detailed, subtly incisive, and filled with knowing references to jazz, Shakespeare, Nat King Cole, Greek Mythology, Finnegans Wake, gutbucket blues, New Orleans, The Bible, and everything and anything else that goes into the Black experience.

I was kind of intrigued by the whopping length--1200 large, closely spaced pages-- and I set myself to getting all the way to the end. I like ambitious, massive, complex world-building type books.

I'm starting to veer a little bit away from that. DD is a fine book, and it had plenty of power and hidden wonders that I probably missed. It's very readable, lively, and funny. It's a little like what might happen if Pynchon, Richard Pryor, and Louis Armstrong got together and started riffing.

But after while, the furious narrative flow just kept rushing headlong and I was hanging on for dear life. I liked the momentum, but sometimes it became a textual whirlpool. Going big is cool, and gutsy, and packs a punch but it also opens itself up to the inherent risk that insight gets lost in all the movement.

I think there's plenty more here than immediately meets the eye, but I would be lying if I didn't admit that I had wished it had been divided up into a trilogy, which apparently Forrest's wife suggested. Would have given everything a deeper resonance, perhaps.

[Anna Goldstein · Rating 3 out of 5]

3.5 stars. Sooo divided between rounding up or down. I wanted to love this so badly. So badly that I looked forward to reading it for months, saving it for summer break when I could give it my full attention. So badly that I nearly broke my back carrying around this brick. So badly that I read every word of this behemoth, even though there were so many times that I wanted to quit. Ultimately, I am glad that I did not quit.

There were many ways in which this book was wonderful. Despite its length, complexity, and zillions of characters, the characters and events were vivid and memorable. Characters would vanish for hundreds of pages, but I instantly remembered them and their past escapades when they'd show back up, a testament to Forrest's vivid and immersive writing. Eloise's Night Light Lounge felt dynamic and real, full of the varied and powerful voices haunting Joubert. Some characters were especially amazing and had such rich voices, such as De Loretto/Imani, all the barmaids but especially Estella by Starlight, Aunt Eloise. So AKA, the women. I looked forward to their returns. This was also a book for pretentious book nerds for sure, given how much it paid homage to literary greats like Dostoevsky, Dante, Joyce, Shakespeare, Woolf, Tolstoy, Morrison, and probably numerous others I didn't catch. Forrest paid homage not only through direct references to the texts, but through quotes, thematic similarities (Cinderella was SO Pecola coded, and the name Breedlove couldn't be a coincidence), and stylistic inspiration (the stream of consciousness, week in the life epic was very directly a Joyce influence). There was also the direct influence of jazz, not only in the songs referenced and quoted, but in the writing itself, which was often lyrical. All of these allusions and influences were extremely well done and contributed to the epicness of this text. For all its frustratingness, I do feel like I was living Joubert's life, and his memories felt viscerally real. Joubert was complicated and sometimes annoying, but very dynamic and believable.

That being said, this was sometimes frustrating as hell and DESPERATELY needed editing. It just absolutely by no means whatsoever needed to be 1100+ pages. Moments that could have been powerful or startling droned on so long and became so repetitious and overwritten that they lost their power. ESPECIALLY Sugar Groove's origin story. It was at the center of the plot and the text, and I get the realism of Joubert repeating it over and over to different parties, but it became so mind-numbing to read for the zillionth time. So many scenes started off so great, but lost me the longer they went on (McGovern McNabb and the star, for instance). There was also a LOT of theologizing and existentialism that went a bit over my head. This is a me problem, but was frustrating when it would go on for LITERALLY hundreds of pages about salvation and purity and such. Mostly well written I guess, but just a bit too much.

All in all, I am certain that I will remember parts of this like fragmented memories. The ending was well done and tied many things up nicely, though some strings did feel a little forced in. The circle back to the start was extra powerful. With some editing down of scenes -- not even cutting any parts, just streamlining -- this book could have EASILY been five stars. As it is, I am glad that I read it, but I will absolutely never read it again.

[Paul Apelgren · Rating 4 out of 5]

What a big strange book this is and an incredible achievement on a lot of levels. I would compare this less to Tolstoy (except the length) and more to Joyce or Proust. Forrest has an encyclopedic knowledge of both those writers as well as Shakespeare, the Bible, Dostoyevsky, pretty much the history of western literature. So many references, DD demands a footnote reader if a scholar out there would ever take the time to make one. Forrest tussles with American history in complex and complicated ways. The style is recursive, discursive, ecstatic, exhaustive, exhausting. He falls in fairly traditional lines of misogyny and homophobia, but his Joubert has depth and the depth allows for some forgiveness on that front. I wish he had treated the suicide of a major character with more urgency (Joubert goes on a whole chapter's intellectual journey at the barber shop before dealing with the news properly) but all in all, this book is as ambitious as they come, and there is no other book quite like it out there. Forrest writes like Forrest, its difficult to think of others' style that matches, and for that alone, this book and perhaps all his others are worth the time it takes to read him.

[John P. Davidson · Rating 5 out of 5]

This book is a triumph. A treasure trove of characters, language, music, and Black experience, this novel follows a character named Joubert Jones for one week in 1966. He lives in Forest County, not a real place but a stand-in for Chicago’s South Side. Joubert is a veteran, recently returned to his city, who works for his aunt Eloise’s newspaper and tends bar at her club, Night Light Lounge. Continuing with my inadequate description seems pointless - this novel, which has allusions to classical mythology, the Bible, and earlier literature, is a masterpiece. It is definitely in the top twenty five of novels I have read in my lifetime.

[Robert · Rating 3 out of 5]

Well, not literally. But got some 220 pages in and threw in the towel. It's written well - OVERwritten, some could say - but at over 1000+ pages, I just found very little to keep me going forward with it when there's so much else that's much more engaging to me.

Yet another work of art that I thoroughly don't appreciate. Others may...

[Dave Barie · Rating 5 out of 5]

Joycean in scope and ability, this book was captivating from the jump. Don't let the page count deter you. This book will reward you many times over!

[Descending Angel · Rating 2 out of 5]

This one disappointed me a fair bit. Could of been a decent 300 page book, but it's overblown, uninteresting in a lot of places and doesn't add up to much.

[Brooke]

Not a DNF. Just not what I’m looking for right now 😔

[Phil Henderson · Rating 3 out of 5]

From c. January 2018:

"I've been engrossed in this book for the past week and find it stimulating, to say the least. Yet there are problems with this text that no one has mentioned to my knowledge. The editing in the latter half of the book is inexcusably bad. (For instance, the racial slur "ofay" is often written as O'Fay, and I doubt if this is intentional.) The writing becomes repetitious and overly redundant. I'm not finished reading it, but at this point I would give it a B/B- due to the bad editing, repetitiousness, and often stilted and stagey dialogue."

[Torry · Rating 2 out of 5]

This is a long book...