![]() “I hope to tell the story of this community up to the present,” he says. ![]() Only the Strong feels like three interlinking novellas, with characters from one reappearing in the others often the reader’s perspective on these characters changes, and people who seem fearsome at first are revealed, in other sections of the book, to have tenderness.įor Asim, Only the Strong is a continuation of a project he began with A Taste of Honey. His other two major characters, each dominating her own stretch of the book, are Artinces Noel, a doctor in love and Noel’s protégé, Charlotte, who ventures off to college. In his novel, he returns to Guts Tolliver, a neighborhood enforcer who softens after Dr. So who are the members of the mostly African American community in Only the Strong? Well, some of the characters return from A Taste of Honey, Asim’s previous collection of linked short stories. You don’t have situations where families have lived on blocks for generations.” But then, Asim says, “the ‘solid’ citizens all moved away because the suburbs were open to them and hadn’t been before. Louis at a time when the notion of community strength, through troubled, didn’t feel impossible. ![]() ![]() “You need a solid community to have strength,” Asim says. Louis) in the years after the assassination of Martin Luther King, Jr. ![]() Jabari Asim has always liked the word “strong.” It was, in fact, the working title for his first novel, Only the Strong -subtitled, intriguingly, An American Novel-which takes place in Gateway City (a thinly veiled St. ![]()
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