A talker, a tale-teller, a sojourner

Author: By James A. Miller

Date: SUNDAY, January 17, 1999

Page: E3

Section: Books

Hard upon the heels of ``The Healing,'' the 1998 novel that announced Gayl Jones's triumphant reemergence on the American literary scene (and, simultaneously, contributed to the bizarre and tragic events that led to a police standoff in Kentucky and her husband's death), comes her latest effort, ``Mosquito'' -- a work that has traveled a considerable distance from the spare, laconic, minimalist prose of her earlier novels, ``Corregidora'' and ``Eva's Man.''

Sojourner Nadine Jane Johnson, also known as Mosquito, is a native Kentuckian, an African-American woman, and an independent truck driver whose route runs through southern Texas along the Mexican border, and ``Mosquito'' is the story she tells -- to the extent that a story can be discerned in the cascade of language that flows from her tongue and engulfs her readers. Like her counterpart, Harlan Jane Eagleton, the narrator of ``The Healing,'' Nadine is, above all, a talker and a tale-teller. A shrewd observer, with an opinion on everything she sees or hears about, a raconteur extraordinaire who commands a rich repository of memories and cultural references, Sojourner roams easily from one experience to the next, weaving the past, present, and future into the rhythms and idioms of everyday speech.

Here, for example, she comments on her fondness for Budweiser: ``I ain't no drunk, I just likes me my Bud Light. Some people says I gets that from my Uncle Buddy. His real name Buddy Johnson, but they would call him Bud on account of his name and on account of him liking that Budweiser. I usedta see him when I was a little girl growing up. He the one John Henry usedta think he the sorta man he'd like to be, you know. Least that what he told me one time when he found out that Uncle Bud were my uncle. He fought in the Second World War, Uncle Bud, stayed in Paris for a while, come back to the States, stayed in Kentucky for a while, then went up north.''

This particular form of stream-of-consciousness is characteristic of ``Mosquito'' as a whole, and Gayl Jones's ability to sustain this performance is undoubtedly a literary tour de force. Nevertheless, some readers will have difficulty with this novel precisely because of the centrality of Nadine's voice. To the extent to which ``Mosquito'' can be said to have a plot, it revolves around Nadine's accidental involvement in the sanctuary movement for immigrants crossing from Mexico, a movement whose resonance with the 19th-century Underground Railroad she quickly grasps; around her deepening friendship with Delgadina, a self-educated Chicana bartender, and her close relationship with a childhood friend, Monkey Bread; around her growing ties with Maria, the Mexican immigrant whose baby is almost born in the back of her truck; and around her love affair with Ray, a passionate revolutionary deeply committed to the sanctuary movement.

But to describe ``Mosquito'' in this way is somewhat misleading, because nothing really happens in this novel. It may also be misleading to call ``Mosquito'' a novel, since this is a work that steadfastedly resists not only any sense of a linear narrative but also the qualities we often associate with well-made fictions: shape, symmetry, proportion, epiphanies. Instead, Mosquito is a work that aspires to the condition of ``truth,'' of ``experience'' in all of its formlessness and apparent chaos. Nadine recognizes this aspect of her performance when she digresses from her account of her first meeting with Ray, who is then dressed in a priest's garb, to turn directly to her reader/auditors: ``I spent so much time telling y'all about Delgadina, y'all probably forgot about that priest. But that's the way true stories is.''

In the early pages of her performance, Nadine invokes the figure of the jazz musician: ``I be wondering if it be possible to tell a true jazz story, where the peoples that listens can just enter the story and start telling it and adding things wherever they wants. The story would provide the jazz foundation, the subject, but they be improvising around that subject or them subjects and be composing their own jazz story.''

At another point, she seizes upon Delgadina's definition of her ideal novel: ``It would be a novel where you could read any chapter when you wanted to and where you wanted to read it. After you read the first chapter and got introduced to the principal characters, you didn't have to read the novel chapter by chapter. Ideally, you didn't even have to start reading the beginning first. For her that the ideal novel, the ideal way of telling a tale.''

This is, pretty much, the way ``Mosquito'' unfolds. Somewhat like a free-jazz performance, Nadine's discourse rambles, sidles like a crab, shuttles through different time zones, and abruptly shifts pace and subject matter. Nadine's strategic placement -- geographically, culturally, and spiritually -- locates her at the intersection of many borders, and ``border crossings'' is a subject that ``Mosquito'' relentlessly and exhaustively explores. Along the way, Nadine -- whose command of the vernacular is matched by a dazzling display of erudition -- explodes racial and cultural stereotypes by revealing the complexity of lives concealed and congealed by fixed notions of identity.

Nadine's rambling discourses are rich and allusive, ranging from commentary on popular culture icons like Denzel Washington, Cheech and Chong, and Oprah Winfrey to learned reflections on Native American and Chinese trickster figures, Shakespeare's Othello, and Buddhism. In ``Mosquito,'' Gayl Jones has created a book composed in part of transcripts of letters; excerpts from journals; characters created by her mother, Lucille Jones, as well as an entire play written by her; dream sequences; and excerpts from the newsletter of a mysterious black women's collective, the Daughters of Nzingha. One of the newsletters of the Daughters of Nzingha provides, in fact, an important clue to this work's designs, in the form of an interview with Nadine's friend Monkey Bread:

``I don't mix my words or change my words around none. I don't have to explain none of my meanings to y'all. And I don't negotiate my identity with nobody. Even our own peoples. I am who I am. I do writes for peoples who know how to hear me. I writes with as many words as I wants and digresses as much as I can to get the ideas to the listeners. I think that is so important. Not only to tell the readers what happens in a story but to get your ideas to them, your opinions.''

For persistent readers, those who know how to hear this distinctive and unusual voice, ``Mosquito'' will yield some rewards. For others, this work, like a mosquito, will buzz along -- nagging, irritating, provoking, exasperating.