ajtun

Describing events around 25 years before it was published in 1986, read by me 25 years later in 2011, Jujitsu for Christ is an incredible book that treads some terrifically dangerous ground. As I was reading the first few chapters and realizing what a wonderful, insightful, jaundiced, and wry piece of writing this is, I had to wonder why I had never heard of it before. The author knows like the back of his hand the way the relationship between church and believer works in the South and the cant and cadences used to express it. The endpaper tells us Mr. Butler was raised in Alligator, Mississippi, the son of a Baptist preacher, so there's every reason in the world he should. Then there's the peculiarity that our schoolboy narrator is no less attuned to the thought and discipline of Jujitsu, and with these two philosophies careening together, we have all we need for a morality play of depth and poignancy and, since he seems to want it that way, a lot of telling humor. But then we get to the race relations part of the story, and somehow the author seems to know all about that epic of tension in American, too, and just where we were poised in the early 1960s, and now we get other narrators, not only the naive white schoolboy but a wide array of black characters making themselves known and the author's asides to illuminate the boneheaded Southern prejudices as well. So this is getting a little scary, and a little too candid and a little too brutal to be able to talk about in your English literature classes. Of course that never kept Ralph Ellison's Invisible Man out of college, and in fact the writer seems to have guessed that I'll be pondering this and at one point has his narrator bemusedly pull a copy of Ellison's book off the shelf just to let me know. And then we get to the parts about how kids in the 1960s ever managed to approach sex, back in the days before we had porn on TV and the internet all the time and it was an oblique canter of uncertainty and bridled passion and the blind leading the blind -- and we know then that this is never a book you could hand to a friend and say here, you ought to read this. It's just too excruciatingly personal! Somebody could put it all in a movie now and we'd watch it without blinking. But in a book in 1986 it's over the top. Even in 2011 there's no single individual I can think of to whom I could recommend this fantastic, funny, calamitously truthful novel. That's the reason I'm not giving it five stars. It's too searing to share. I'm amazed it could even be written.

2022-11-14 14:20