SITE TOOLS
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Not A Day Goes By
E. Lynn Harris
Reviewed by Steven G. Fullwood
E. Lynn Harris, the black community's equivalent to Danielle Steele, serves up
another touch of crass with his latest book Not a Day Goes By. The story revolves around
two self-centered middle-class black people who, on a good day, make you sick. The good
news is that you discover that you hate them within the first four (and thankfully short)
chapters, so you can loathe these two idiots for the 46 remaining chapters. The bad news
is that reading Not a Day Goes By is like being marooned on a desert island with only a
stack of Ebony Magazines.
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Basil Henderson, an ex-football playa, uh,
player, blessed with a fetching set of "cat-like gray eyes," and body of steel
is getting married to Yancey Harrington Braxton (no, really, that's her name), a hot, sexy
little bronze Broadway actress whose ego is even bigger than her name. These two meet,
fall in love and ready themselves to hop the broom.
Harris moves his characters around like a child would a baby doll. He dresses them up, he
tells us what they are doing. Face it, he gives great soap opera and describes their
clothes and environments to the nth degree. Now, I don't know about you, but I don't need
to know about the thread count of Ms Braxton's exquisite bath towels (which, by the way,
come in peach, mint green, and lavender), and I am even less interested in the layout of
her apartment. Then again, I'm not a schizophrenic, self-loathing, social climber either.
But I digress.
Harris starts the novel with Basil telling Yancey that he can't marry her. Of course, she
gets her very expensive panties in a bunch and starts yelling that he can't do this to her
and blah, blah, blah. Readers are given a taste of the couple's abysmal pasts, which
provides for plenty of drama - secret pregnancies, sabotage attempts, absentee mothers,
and the only real reason people read Harris in the first place - taboo homosexual sex.
Basil epitomizes what is commonly known as being on the "DL" (down low.) When he
meets Yancey, he changes direction on his "bi-ways" and decides to stick to the
narrow and straight. When he asks Yancey to marry him, her meddling mother Ava decides to
run a background check on him. That's when his sexual past is aired. Everybody's incensed
and now nobody's getting laid. Not that Harris ever writes about sex explicitly, as he
always draws (sorry) the curtain before anybody gets buck wild. Ironically, it's the only
thing he doesn't describe to death.
Harris once said that he wrote his first novel, Invisible
Life, to alert unsuspecting heterosexual black women about the secret lives of some of
their men. He also said that he wrote Just As I Am to
confirm their suspicions. With Not a Day Goes By, Harris gives those very readers what
they expect - a gay man dishing the dirt on their no-good, two-timing boyfriends, men they
shouldn't bother with in the first place. M
September 2000 |
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