Divine Days by Leon Forrest, with a foreword by Kenneth W. Warren and a preface by Zachary Price. Seminary Co-op Offsets/Northwestern University Press, 1,140 pp., $28.00 (paper)
For the experimental novelist Leon Forrest, the sermon was a major source of inspiration: a flexible form, especially as refined in the African American tradition, that lends itself to both lofty rhetoric and common speech, mingling history, personal observation, moral assertion, and the interpretation of myth—to say nothing of the joy of allusion. In “In the Light of Likeness—Transformed,” an autobiographical essay collected in The Furious Voice for Freedom (1994), he wrote of discovering “a kind of cosmic totality within the monologue of the Negro preacher, which might, in turn, lead to a cosmic consciousness of the race.”
The characters in Forrest’s novels…
