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Terry McMillan:
Taking Faulkner
in Her Own Way

I haven't heard of many people who have read William Faulkner's classic novel As I Lay Dying, in which a grieving family travels for several days in order to bury their recently deceased matriarch in accordance with her last wishes. I am quite sure (although I found nothing to support that) that Terry McMillan has, for her latest book, A Day Late and A Dollar Short, is basically structured in a very similar way as Faulkner's is.

In both books, every chapter is narrated in the first person by different characters, and every one of them has a distinctive, clear and individual voice that sees each situation in a very personal way. Both of them are also around the family's matriarch, although in Faulkner's case, she is dead from page one (although she does narrate her own flashback chapter, as she listens to her sons putting her casket together), while in McMillan's, she is alive and recovering in a Las Vegas hospital (traces of Catch-22?) after an asthma attack.

That, however, is where common grounds end and differences start. McMillan's novel is about a dysfunctional African-American family of the nineties much inspired in her own family (although she denies that in her notes), while Faulkner's is about ignorant Caucasian farmers from an imaginary region of this country.

In A Day Late and A Dollar Short, the story mainly goes around Viola Price, her four grown children and her cheating, absent ex-husband of thirty eight years.

Viola, the matriarch, is by far the most interesting of all of the book's main characters (there are almost no secondary ones). She is an asthma-stricken, loving mother of her children who have problems most of them all seem not to admit to. As she lays in the hospital, she immediately realizes she is there because she worries too much about her children. She doesn't even want to think of her Cecil, the "bad habit that I've had for thirty-eight years, which would make him my husband."

Viola Price is pretty much inspired by the author's late mother, Madeline Tillman, who was also afflicted by asthma. In fact, Terry McMillan interrupted the writing of this novel in 1993 when Ms. Tillman passed away at the untimely age of 60. In a 1996 article from Voices from The Gaps, it is stated that "she was very close to her mother and her death threw her into a tailspin that lasted for months. She was too devastated to continue working on her novel A Day Late and a Dollar Short, which featured a loving mother similar to her own." In that same article, it is stated that the novel was yet unfinished, and that it was then not known whether she would finish it or not.

The story goes on, chapter by chapter, with the different points of view of the other characters. Take, for example, Lewis Price, Viola's only son (all the other Price children are women). McMillan actually makes it sound as if it were a man telling his side of the story. He is an alcoholic (although he does not admit to it) and in and out of jail for small crimes such as stealing old tires and the like, even though he is supposedly a clever man with enough intellect to be a creative person (as Viola Puts it, "how could somebody with an IQ of 146 be so stupid?)

Another extremely amusing character is Paris.

She is a successful caterer in California, and she is the Price daughter which is closest to her mother. The character is possibly based on the author herself, for she is, like the author, a successful person in the family who has to deal with her siblings' envy, and, like the author once did (during the eighties, Terry McMillan fought a victorious battle against cocaine and alcohol addiction), has a drug problem. She is a single mom, and she hides from her own problems by popping prescription painkillers on a more than regular basis.

It is quite easy to become lost during the first fifty pages of the book, for, unlike Faulkner's As I Lay Dying, the chapters are not named after their narrators.

However, once the reader gets used to its pace, it is quite easy to find out who is narrating which chapter (there is a family tree inside the cover that helps the overwhelmed reader), specially from the kind of language used by each narrator.

Paris, for example speaks "standard" English due to her College education and her middle-class environment. Charlotte and Janelle, the younger sisters, who do not have a college education, tend to use a more popular form of language. As for Viola and Cecil, they mostly speak Ebonics.

Although the story is mostly funny (as the Washington Post put it, "hilarious"), there are quite a few serious issues that the characters have to deal with, such as the addictions mentioned earlier. The other Price family members have to deal with cases of incest (another obvious Faulkner influence), marital betrayal, divorce, unwanted pregnancies, closet homosexuality and finally a shocking event that might ultimately disintegrate the seemingly thin Price family ties.

The only negative point of the whole book would be that it is one hundred pages too long. Once the shocking, culminating event happens around page 280, McMillan lingers with the plot for another one hundred pages instead of simply wrapping up the story. She did the same thing with How Stella Got Her Groove Back, but back then the lingering had a more personal reason, for that story was more autobiographical than this one seems to be.

I read somewhere that Terry McMillan does not want to take this book to the screen as she did with her three previous stories, because according to that article, the plot would not be suitably adapted into a movie. I couldn't agree more, for there are many inner thoughts of the characters that, although amusing in reading, would be quite complicated to put on film without boring the viewer to death.

However, I can't help but wonder how A Day Late and a Dollar Short with a cast such as Angela Bassett (as Paris), Chris Rock (as Lewis), James Gandolfini (as Janelle's husband, George) and Bill Cosby (as Cecil Price) would look like in the big screen.

A Day Late and A Dollar Short is a very readable book even with the setbacks this writer has mentioned, and a fine example of good contemporary African American literature that can be enjoyed by any kind of reader.

Ernest Barteldes
Staten Island,NY
http://barteldes.freeyellow.com/index.html 

richard e. schiff,
richard
e. schiff,
 richard e. schiff
Richard Schiff
 Richard Schiff
Richard Schiff ...

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