Jazz Moon
This coming-out tale, the author’s debut, is notable for its very subject matter: a gay black man’s personal journey of discovery and self-acceptance in 1920s Harlem and Paris. Ben is a young poet unhappily married to a woman who loves him, and struggling against his attraction to a talented trumpeter named Baby Back Johnson. The men begin an affair, and when Baby Back gets a gig in Paris, Ben goes along. But the musician’s ego gets in the way of intimacy, and Ben finds himself adrift, seeking consolation with strangers in seedy underground dives and suffering writer’s block. He meets an artist and falls in love – and begins to write – again.
Such a simple plot requires real complexity to sustain itself in book form, but Okonkwo’s book falls just short of the mark. While we learn much about Ben’s first homosexual experience, his inner life doesn’t draw us in the way it should. Race, a fertile terrain, is barely mentioned, save for a token altercation on the cruise liner to Paris. Okonkwo’s writing shines in places, especially his invocations of jazz and his detailed descriptions of 1920s Paris, but the profusion of “Ben’s” poetry throughout the book interrupts the narrative flow too many times, pulling the reader out of the dream that fiction should be. Jazz Moon’s real strength lies in its depiction of relationship, in the petty quarrels and simmering resentments that can unravel the most connected of couples, and in its exploration of the mundanities of everyday love that strengthen bonds. All in all, Jazz Moon is a promising start for Okonkwo, who needs to go deeper – and ditch the poetry, or write a book of poems, instead – the next time around.
