A great American novel...Jesse Robinson, black American novelist, is between novels and out-of-sorts and gravitates to the apartment of a white woman with the euphemistically-suspect name of Kriss Cummings. The two engage in a bacchanal, states of which are described in a complex disjointed contrapuntal writing style ("perception and delirium have interpenetrated"--James Sallis, CHESTER HIMES; A Life) far from the naturalistic methodology employed by Himes in previous books. A style that gives the novel more affinity with the work of Lowry than that of Steinbeck or Lewis...Partly protest, mostly condemnation, the novel illustrates Himes's contention that the system mistreats the black man and white woman equally. Jessie and Kriss are hurt, and hurting, victims--it is implied--of a white male dominated power structure. As victims they are also outcasts, each isolated and divested by the powers that be. Their obviously sick condition, a result of hatred turned inward, is a pathology, Himes contends, created by the greater pathological condition of a racist and sick society that condemns each victim to a life of absurdity; that is, life lived with no relation to the society and its rulers. Cocooned in Kriss's apartment--the constantly running television introducing an element of inanity to he proceedings (the inanity of the world mirroring events within)--the pair embark on a fatal debauch leading to murder, a senseless act in itself, but the logical conclusion, the novel implies, of the pathology. W.F. Burke, author, WRITERS LEFT OF CENTER, Shires Press, 2008.