Strivers Row is the third of Baker's City of Fire trilogy. The earlier books are Dreamland and Paradise Alley. All take place in New York City. Strivers Row is a neighborhood housing upper and middle class Negro families including the Doves. Milton Dove, the father of Jonah and father-in-law of Amanda, founded the New Jerusalem Church.Malcolm is a young hustler. The action takes place in Harlem during the WWII. At a time after the war and beyond the book's time period, Malcolm will become Malcolm X.Baker is an excellent researcher who organizes hundreds of facts and insights about life in Harlem during the war. He reveals his many sources in a seven page Acknowledgments, and a Note On Sources, at the end of the novel. Harlem is a major character.The plot addresses the intertwined lives of Malcolm and Jonah. Baker accomplishes this by alternating chapters entitled "Malcolm" or "Jonah" and uses the chapters to provide new insights about the respective men and to develop the plot. Baker does not follow a strict chapter alternation; Malcolm dominates and two or more consecutive chapters frequently are devoted to him.Malcolm comes from a family of 10 counting half brothers and half sisters. The family following its father's death almost starves. It is Malcolm's job to go to the local slaughter house to fight other boys for discarded animal lungs. He is elected class president and looks forward to career counseling. His classmates are steered to interesting jobs but his teacher/counselor humiliates him by claiming Malcolm might one day become a successful handyman or carpenter.Jonah and Malcolm meet on a train where Malcolm is employed selling sandwiches from a cart pushed down the aisle. Malcolm fights and saves Jonah from a beating by drunken white soldiers. After the fight, Malcolm jumps off the stopped train and dives into water. Neither man knows the other, even the other's name.Malcolm begins life in Harlem as a waiter in Small's Bar. Small has bribed a local detective, but is very concerned that other vice squad cops might discover his many illegal activities. He strongly cautions Malcolm to stay within the law. Malcolm does not and directs a soldier to a prostitute. Small fires him and tells him to stay out of the bar.All is not lost. Malcolm dances extraordinarily exuberantly with Miranda, a white woman. They leave and have outstanding sex. Malcolm is obsessively smitten.After Small's Malcolm turns to various hustles including running numbers, selling dope and working as a john walker, taking white men to black whores. He dreams of making enough money to take Miranda off to Hollywood.Jonah regards himself to be pampered failure. He is the head preacher at his father's church, but can not excite and motivate his congregation. After the train fight he believes he can not protect his wife. He is light skinned and at college passed for white for several months. His greatest failure was being found out. Occasionally, he passes for white again to see his sister, Sophia, in the Village, who is also passing.Malcolm is bright and starts reading The Biography of Elijah Muhammad as told by X. He is very interested and almost haunted by the book but he does not stop hustling. Baker points out in the Acknowledgments that Malcolm would later, again beyond this book's scope, use his redemption from crime as a central theme in the Autobiography of Malcolm X.Strivers Row is 550 pages long. My interest was kept throughout except for the description of Elijah Muhammad's life and theology. Never trust a white man is a main point in that theology.Malcolm, Jonah and Miranda dramatically come together. An excellent book, you will feel as if you are in Harlem.
I think Kevin Baker is one of the finest writers of historical fiction I've ever encountered. He is both a great storyteller, and an astute historical researcher. One of the potential pitfalls of historical fiction is that it's all too easy for a writer to sacrifice story in order to accommodate all the fascinating and important facts that have surfaced in the course of research. Baker successfully avoids that trap in all three volumes of his City of Fire trilogy. He is able to weave an at times almost mystical, yet wholly credible, account of Harlem in the 1940s without, apparently, making anything up. I was prepared to find his idea of using the young Malcolm X (Malcolm Little, as he was known at the time) as a primary character to be too ambitious, and to fall flat; I was wrong. The character of Malcolm is very sensitively drawn, with a judicious mixture of bravado and naivete. Although the book stands on its own, it does have particularly strong ties to the first volume of the trilogy, Paradise Alley, which I would recommend reading first.
What do You think about Strivers Row (2007)?
The third in Baker's City of Fire trilogy, Striver's Row is an excellent finish to a great run of books. This one was set in Harlem in the 1940's. One thing that I didn't expect was that Baker brought some of the characters from the previous two novels into this one, albeit usually not in a very important way -- but it was enough to give the reader of all three books a sense of continuity and that the books were indeed a trilogy and not just randomly thrown together because they were set in different historical moments in New York.
—Stephanie
Kevin Baker is one of those gifted authors who recreates a time and place vividly as if his pen channels a movie camera-- Striver's Row is akin to a long cinematic prose poem about Harlem in the early 1940's. Arguably the most intriguing part of the novel is the portrayal of the early life of Malcolm Little (before he becomes Malcolm X) and how he gets caught up in the murky and edgy life of numbers running in 1940's Harlem. The parallel narrative concerns Jonah Dove, a fictional minister whose Christian faith is shaken by his personal shortcomings and the political realities of African Americans during this explosive period in history, with race riots comingling with America's entrance into World War II. Each protagonist's narrative briefly intersects with the other, but most memorable are the rich details of Harlem, leading us into old gin-joints and dance halls of the period, and Baker finds just the right rhythm and phrasing to paint the atmosphere of '40's swing music and culture such that the prose attains a kind of syncopated street beat, as close to the rhythm and spirit of jazz as pure narrative can achieve. Adding another layer of authenticity is the New York slang of the era, not overdone, but polishing the dialogue with an urban twang that resonates of a time and place otherwise preserved in the pages of Richard Wright and Raymond Chandler. Baker creates rich portrayals of true-to-life figures without resorting to cookie-cutter or newspaper-thin portrayals. Though the theme of racial struggle are clear enough, depicted in the separate experiences of Malcom X and Jonah Dove, yet it is difficult to tease out an overarching meaning or grand statement in these colorful pages of 1940's Harlem and New York. Yet, the prose is so moving and stirs up many fascinating images the work stands as a splendid addition to Baker's historical panoramas found in other novels that explore Fin-de-Siecle and early 20th Century America including Dreamland.
—Jeff
A wonderfully-written historical novel set in Harlem during WWII. In vivid detail Baker tells the story of the dramatic early life of Malcolm X--depicting, among other things, his coming to terms with his mother's madness and his hustling in the vibrant underground world of wartime Harlem. I love the way that he interweaves Malcolm's narrative with Jonah's. Jonah is the reluctant heir to one of Harlem's historic black churches. Over the course of the novel he struggles with his call, with being a light-skinned black man who can pass for "white," and in his marriage to his seemingly perfect preacher's wife. By the end of the novel Jonah steps into his ministry and becomes a leading voice against racism and prejudice in a riot-torn Harlem. A very memorable read that has me thinking about how disenfranchised people fight back against systemic injustice. The edition I read also has a suggested walking tour in the back with notes Baker provides. Given how gentrified Harlem has become it's probably harder and harder to find very many traces of the great Harlem of the first half of the 20th century Baker re-imagines in his novel.
—Stephanie
