Francisco

March 15, 2023
A poetic autofictional narrative about a Black woman artist and her relationship with an indie filmmaker, originally published in 1974. The story follows a young, unnamed actress as she navigates 1970s Hollywood, San Francisco, and New York City. The narrative reads like stream-of-consciousness diary entries, written entirely in lowercase letters; the book's informal spelling and grammar contributes to its offbeat charm: "i be wanderin off sometimes--and when i come back i cannot tell you where i have been, cause i do not even know i was gone." At the heart of the novel is a relationship between the protagonist and Francisco, a young Black indie filmmaker. The narrator is transfixed by Francisco, whose commitment to his art both attracts and frustrates her. Over the course of the book, the reader is spun through a kaleidoscope of movie screenings and parties as the narrator, always in motion, flits from one residence to another and back again. In her travels, she encounters dozens of colorful characters who leap from the page with humor and specificity. Some of these cameos--Muhammad Ali, Angela Davis, and Amiri Baraka, to name a few--anchor the text in its historical context, adding the weight of hindsight to the narrative. The narrator is like all young people finding their ways in the world--at times apathetic, indignant, lost, and alone. Over the course of the novel, her disillusionment mounts, and she offers searing criticism about sex, race, and politics: "america was the wizard of oz country." As a love story, the book is refreshingly ambiguous. The narrator can speak compellingly about Black feminism, but she allows herself to endure insults and neglect at her lover's hands, sacrificing her own needs at the altar of his artistic greatness. The book makes space for rumination, complexity, and transience. It offers a unique window into the mind of one woman, at one moment in history, and by doing so examines beauty, sex, and art through her eyes. Once you get into the flow of Newman's prose, you'll find artistic and intellectual riches.

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March 6, 2023
First published in 1974, actor-turned-minister Newman’s only novel is a lush narrative of a young Black woman’s love affair with a filmmaker. The two drift through the shifting currents of art and liberation in early 1970s California, a richly defined landscape that Saidiya Hartman calls in her foreword an “atlas of black culture.” The unnamed narrator achieved fame and commercial success as a teen actor but has grown disillusioned with Hollywood. She meets Francisco, an independent filmmaker, and becomes enraptured, increasingly sublimating her own creativity in favor of nurturing his. They crash in guest rooms and living rooms up and down California, living a bohemian life, making love, listening to James Brown, and arguing about who has sold out. The prose, unfettered by punctuation or capitalization, envelops readers in the narrator’s funkified quest for meaning, love, and freedom, and whether they can all coexist (“its not so much behind every great man is a great woman, as much as a great man is a great man and a girl is a girl”). In an afterword, Newman admits she struggled with the rerelease, luxuriating as it does in a lifestyle she no longer endorses. Readers will be grateful for the raw fervor and passion found in these pages.

May 1, 2023

Mills Newman's freeform autobiographical 1974 novel depicts a soulful young Black woman's search for self at the height of the Black Arts movement. Growing up a middle class child actor, our heroine has had enough of "working for a man who was makin a fortune off a people he thought so little of." Eschewing blaxploitation cinema, she has an epiphany talking with an auto mechanic with a smile "like the root of a tree, so deep, so alive.... That old Black man was music." Enter idealistic documentarian Francisco, with whom she falls intensely in love and whose blazing star she orbits from Hollywood to Berkeley to Malibu, inspired and eclipsed by her longing and devotion to him amidst the fading afterglow of the 1960s as it "seems like almost everybody has been bought." A new afterword offers a surprising yet perhaps inevitable coda to the author's spiritual quest. VERDICT A bildungsroman like no other, this fecund, funky brew evokes a memorable era of possibility and perplexity, while sounding the obscure depths of love, sacrifice, and selfhood.

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