BO 0 K S
619
reaching out for the terrible news of the day - the end tables are strewn
with
L 'Express
and
L e Monde,
but she never quite makes it past
Votre
Maison.
Her thoughts often center on interior decor and the book is
smartly done up with a looking-glass motif. Laurence speculates, answer–
ing her
0\1'11
question: "Who was hiding behind those reflections that
spun in the mirrors? Maybe nobody at all." In the end she rises up on
principle and insists that her daughter be allowed to carryon a disturb–
ing adolescent friendship with a Jewish girl. Bravo! Though Laurence's
problems seem suburban to us, they have captured Mme. de Beauvoir.
After one rowdy scene she observes - "Oh, all the pictures had been
shattered to pieces, and it would never be possible to put them together
again. Laurence wan ted to take a tranquilizer too; she needed all her
clarity of mind." The tranquilizers would have done nicely - a novel was
excessive.
Maureen Howard
WHAT IS TO BE DONE?
THE CRISIS OF THE NEGRO INTELLECTUAL.
By
Harold Cruse.
WUiam
Morrow. $8.95.
Even the title of this book constitutes a kind of heresy in that
liberal tradition which maintains that thc community of "intellectuals"
is raceless and shares only work-related problems of methodology, anal–
ysis, craftmanship, for it sets up a "class" of black intellectuals with
common problems not shared by nonblacks.
Mr. Cruse perceives the crisis to be one of identity and func–
tion; and he is justly impatient with the kind of statement that
was current among black writers only quite recently: "I don't want to
be a black writer, I want to be a writer." To outline this "crisis" in
its contemporary complexity, Mr. Cruse finds it necessary to range over
a number of large questions affecting the black community, each of
which deserves separate treatment. The book is simultaneously a history
of Harlem political movements, a discussion of the ethnic origins of
American popular culture and of the implications of cultural pluralism
in American society, an account of the ideologies emerging from the
black community's attempts to define itsE'lf and its relationship to the
