Colter's Novelistic Contradictions

Abstract

From first novel to fourth there is an increasing openness and open-endedness to Cyrus Colter's novels. It may be that many readers of his work regard him primarily as the author of a celebrated collection of short stories, but in his novels Colter's ambitions are greater and his achievement lies not only in his success in presenting character-the forte of his stories-but also in his structural, thematic, and stylistic explorations of the open-endedness of life and the enormously difficult choices to which men and women are forced in their struggle against their circumstances. When they can no longer postpone action and must choose what to do, they usually fail to solve the contradictions they are living, even if they do irreversibly determine, if only by violence or some other unsatisfying simplification, to end their hesitation between opposing possibilities they can no longer balance. Cyrus Colter's first novel is a naturalistic portrait of contradictions in the lives of a fictional group of working-class black Americans in the city of Chicago. Focused primarily on the unfolding conflict between an aging seamstress and her granddaughter, The Rivers of Eros is a study of attitude and aspiration, of fatalism and conflicts of character. Colter's choice of the late 1960s as the date of his narrative enables him to show how inadequately the social experience and attitudes of the older woman have prepared her for the accelerated conflicts within black American culture that impinge on her young granddaughter, and provides him with the opportunity to depict a variety of styles of engagement or retreat from those conflicts. Colter's fictional style is straightforward, and although it is sometimes ironic, it conveys great sympathy for all his characters: the seamstress, who becomes mentally enfeebled; the feckless granddaughter; the puzzled and touchingly innocent but angry grandson; two types of black nationalist revolutionary (one a ladies' man and a drunk, the other sober, passionate, and kind); the retired postal employee turned historian of African-American culture; the lodge enthusiast; and so on. The novel's violent climax does not seem to represent an authorial judgment brought down on the characters' strategies of survival and understanding, but rather a sober acknowledgment of an old woman's power over a young girl and boy, by virtue of their sheer dependency, their inability to survive without her. Yet the old woman's inability to escape the legacy of her own guilt, exacerbated by perhaps needless or at least exaggerated and misplaced scruples, themselves become obsessive, brings on the destruction of the teenage girl who loves her and has been raised by her. One may well interpret this denouement as a pessimistic vision of social realities. The novel does not gainsay these, yet Colter's portrait of the undoing of life attributes tragic magnitude not only to the suffering struggle against racism and poverty but