Book 40: Maud Martha

Maud Martha

Gwendolyn Brooks

As the person nominally in charge of a large collection of Gwendolyn Brooks papers at the University of Illinois, I figured that it was about time that I got around to reading some of her work. Instead of beginning with any of her many poetry collections, I started with Maud Martha, her only lengthy work of fictional prose. Calling it "fiction" and "prose" is accurate, but just barely: Maud Martha is a semi-autobiographical work that is more concerned with its language than with its characters, setting, or plot. To Brooks's credit, this language often gets one or more of those points across, though it makes for rough going at first and throughout, as the book never really gains any narrative energy. A few characters and incidents appear in repeated motifs, but the book is a set of illustrative vignettes that explore Maud Martha's experiences and surroundings rather than a proper novel about her life. These stories range from isolated to deeply emotional, particularly when issues of race are confronted head-on. Maud Martha- and, by extension, the reader- experiences the casual racism that allows a white saleswoman to casually drop the n-word in a black beauty salon and a white homeowner to presume that blacks live only in squalor. There is a visceral reality to these stories that comes across so clearly in Brooks's prose, which effortlessly places the reader into Maud Martha's shoes despite any differences of time, space, and race that might exist between author, character, and reader. That the book is compelling despite its scattershot plot is a testament to the author's enduring talents.

As a poet, Brooks naturally trades in a kind of subtlety and nuance that asks the reader to contemplate the many meanings of a chosen word or anecdote, and the book is full of small clues and brief quips that betray the author's greater comfort with sparser prose. Despite the fact that many of the vignettes in Maud Martha are compelling, they do not, as a whole, offer a nuanced exploration of the characters, which appears to be at least part of the point. Maud Martha is at once an everywoman and a representation of Brooks herself, which makes the book alternately interesting and bland. Brooks undoubtedly possesses a master's command of the English language, bending it to her will, but the book is much more valuable as a historical artifact, a time capsule, than a story in and of itself; I feel fortunate to have encountered it as part of a multi-generational reading group rather than in a solo venture. Maud Martha feels like Brooks's attempt to explore the nuances of the particular time and place in which she grew up and became a young woman; as such, it is a crucially important and well-executed, though somewhat limited, firsthand depiction of the lives of young black women in mid-20th-century Chicago.

Grade: A-