Product Description

"Marks the debut of a very gifted writer.... Kenan speaks eloquently and with a great deal of courage."--Gloria Naylor

Randall Kenan's daring and innovative first novel weaves a vivid and horrific tale through the generations of a black Southern family.

Sixteen-year old Horace Cross is plagued by issues that hover in his impressionable spirit and take shape in his mind as loathsome demons, culminating in one night of horrible and tragic transformation. In the face of Horace's fate, his cousin Reverend James "Jimmy" Green questions the values of a community that nourishes a boy, places their hopes for salvation on him, only to deny him his destiny.

Told in a montage of voices and memories, A Visitation of the Spirits just how richly populated a family's present is with the spirits of the past and the future.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #169342 in Books
• Published on: 2000-01-25
• Released on: 2000-01-25
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Paperback
• 272 pages

From Publishers Weekly
Four generations of a black North Carolina family emerge in a novel that tracks a teenager's coming to terms with his identity. "Although shifts in time and tone are often jarring and sometimes gratuitous, the strength and richness of Kenan's best passages sweep any objections aside," wrote PW.
Copyright 1990 Reed Business Information, Inc.

Review
"Randall Kenan continues [James] Baldwin's legendary tradition of 'telling it on the mountain' by giving voice to the unvarnished truth about blacks and homosexuality." --San Francisco Chronicle

"A gifted, confident writer." --The Raleigh News & Observer -- Review

Review
"Randall Kenan continues [James] Baldwin's legendary tradition of 'telling it on the mountain' by giving voice to the unvarnished truth about blacks and homosexuality." --San Francisco Chronicle

"A gifted, confident writer." --The Raleigh News & Observer

Customer Reviews

A brilliant novel.
"A Visitation of Spirits" is a portrait of Horace Cross, an adolscent both black and gay. This is an angry, often confrontational, novel dealing with the psychological ramifications wrought by religious condemnation, gross hypocrisy and clergy that myopically perverts scripture by preaching hate and intolerance.

The story is communicated through a series of recollections. Reality and memory coalesce in a nightmarish, drug-induced psychosis. "A Visitation of Spirits" is a haunting novel of a young gay man wrestling with his demons. His struggles are universal; his solution is, unfortunately, both tragic and final. This is a work of incredible depth,passion and understanding.

Randall Kenen, who won a Lambda Award for his short story collection "Let the Dead Bury Thier Dead," is an enormously talented prose stylist. He brings together the best qualities of James Baldwin, Carson McCullers, Toni Morrison and Flannery O'Connor. Higher praise could not be offered.

insightful view of rural community life
This is a powerful novel with a complex construction that takes effort on the part of the reader - chapters occur in two series of events that are identified by date and time as well as "confessions" that review particular lives. The book's strength is in showing the successful rural black family's attitude towards whites and in showing the role of the church in their community. The plot line holding it together is that of a talented teenager unable to come to terms with his homosexual orientation, sure that it will damn him in the sight of God. The context for this self-damnation is set by his deacon grandfather who raised him and who counsels members of the community, his great aunts who assist in raising him who are mothers in the church, and his preacher cousin - the religion which runs through the family is a stern religion with the backbone that allowed his family to succeed.

Within this framework, we get wonderful prose describing the disappearing culture - house raisings, pig slaughters... - and the "new culture" of racial intergration. We see several generations attempting to adjust to the new world while retaining their family values. All in all a book well worth the time required to read and savor it.

Masterpiece
When I reached the last page of this book, and I turned back to the beginning and started over. I have never read a book that so profoundly moved me. Kenan's name should be a household word. He has written a book that lets the reader feel what it is to be black, gay, and shouldering the burden of hundreds of years of family expectations. At the same time, his story is accessible to readers who are neither black nor gay, but simply human beings. Read this book!