The seven league boots Book

Murray is definitely a 20th century novelist, perhaps a first half of the 20th century novelist, writing on the cusp of the 21st century. Ernest Hemingway, Pablo Picasso, Louis Armstrong, James Joyce, and, I’m guessing, John Dos Passos are his influences and his desired peers. The Seven League Boots is the third volume in what I thought was a coming of age trilogy, but two years ago a fourth volume, The Magic Keys, was published. Murray was born in 1916 in rural Alabama, meaning he came of age himself during the Great Depression and Jim Crow and not incidentally during the heyday of a shadow culture of black excellence, where the Talented Tenth were identified and giving community support to find their way to the best in available education so they might at least return to the community as teachers, ministers, doctors, and lawyers or perhaps assume a national role as the scholars, artists, politicians, and leaders who led the next wave in the fight for advancement in American society. Scooter is Murray’s stand-in and in this volume he has graduated college and landed the job of replacement bassist for the nation’s greatest jazz band (think Ellington meets Basie, that good and that influential a leader). He has plans of going on to graduate school but first wants to explore more avenues and earn cash to help him get all the way to his doctorate. As in the previous novels he learns much from his mentors, sponsors, and lovers, travels the country with the band for a year, leaves them to try his hand as a solo musician in LA for a spell, becomes involved with a Hollywood movie star (think Katherine Hephburn), and travels to Europe. He ends his grand tour with plans to re-settle in New York after a down-home visit. Murray is a polymath and writes brilliantly if sometimes preciously about books, food, film, sports, jive, politics, art, and, of course, jazz music. His Joycean experiments with prose rise no higher in inventiveness than Dos Passos’s in USA but, perhaps because their appearance is linked to the music and language of jazz, is more supple and effective. The book is short on plot but moves like a picaresque novel—less a story of overcoming challenge than making a wondrous journey. Success seems pre-determined but, except for the too frequent and cloying reminiscing about his too well-loved former college roommate, works. It is a grand tour and I’ll be beginning The Magic Keys shortly.