Book Review
A fierce tale of love, race, identity

By Barbara Lloyd McMichael
Special to The Seattle Times

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In 2001, Randall achieved what The New York Times called "the panache of persecution" with the publication of her debut novel. "The Wind Done Gone," a take on "Gone With the Wind" from the slaves' point of view, was legally challenged by Margaret Mitchell's estate. Randall and her publisher, Houghton Mifflin, milked the controversy for all it was worth.

In her latest offering, "Pushkin and the Queen of Spades," (Houghton Mifflin, $24) Randall shines her revisionist spotlight variously on American football, Russian literary godfather Alexander Pushkin and the culturally transcendent art of lap dancing. She focuses especially on the African-American experience — from slavery to Motown to the under-sung but influential African-American intellectual tradition.

The heroine of "Pushkin and the Queen of Spades" is Windsor Armstrong, a black professor of Russian literature who takes pride in being a part of the black intellectual elite. Twenty-five years earlier, when she was an undergraduate at Harvard, Windsor was raped by a white man. She named the resulting baby Pushkin X after Russian poet Alexander Pushkin (himself a descendant of an African slave) and Malcolm X, and she raised her boy on the stories of the great black thinkers and leaders of history.

Author appearance Alice Randall will read from "Pushkin and the Queen of Spades," 7:30 tonight, Elliott Bay Book Co., 101 S. Main St., Seattle; free (206-624-6600 or www.elliottbaybook.com).

An attentive mother, Windsor denied her son nothing but for one fragment of his own story: the identity of his father. Despite Windsor's attempts to raise her son as an intellectual, smart young Pushkin shines even more as a football player. When the National Football League drafts him he becomes a star, and in a cruel twist of fate (as far as his mother is concerned) he falls in love with and becomes engaged to a Russian émigrée — who works as a stripper.

Adding insult to injury, Pushkin rescinds Windsor's invitation to the upcoming wedding when she not only disapproves of his bride, she also remains steadfast about withholding information regarding her son's paternity.

Told in the first person, "Pushkin and the Queen of Spades" is Windsor's perimenopausal, self-indulgent rant through issues of racism, family, violence, erotica and academia as she tries to come to terms with her estrangement from her son.

Reviewing her own Motown childhood, Windsor remembers being torn between competing female relatives while her biological mother remained aloof to her. At puberty, in a last-ditch attempt to win her mother's love, Windsor moved with her to Washington, D.C. Her socially ambitious mother remained indifferent to her, but Windsor received an excellent education, which paved the way to Harvard.

Once a spurned child, now a spurned mother, Windsor also remembers being stigmatized as a black, single, pregnant college student. But she found allies in unexpected places and ultimately prevailed in academia, traveling to Russia to study Pushkin, the poet.

The Queen of Spades mentioned in the title derives from a short story Pushkin once wrote about a gambler who squandered love as currency. But the term also alludes to Windsor's fiercely-held identity as a black woman, until she begins to understand what her insistence on rigid racial boundaries may cost her. As a gesture of contrition, she recasts one of Alexander Pushkin's unfinished pieces into a rap poem and offers it as a wedding present to her son and his bride. It is the story that the Russian Pushkin began about his own black great-grandfather. Windsor's version of the story resolves what the Russian poet never did: the acceptance of interracial love.

This novel is unyielding in its intensity. Considering Windsor's frame of mind, it's pitch perfect, but for the reader it often comes across as harangue. As an author, Alice Randall stews and rambles and erupts with sharp observations. She isn't writing to make ideas palatable for others — this is intentionally provocative stuff, designed to open your eyes and make your heart burn.

Copyright © 2004 The Seattle Times Company

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