Francisco

First published in 1974, actor-turned-minister Newman’s only novel is a lush narrative of a young Black woman’s love affair with a filmmaker. The two drift through the shifting currents of art and liberation in early 1970s California, a richly defined landscape that Saidiya Hartman calls in her foreword an “atlas of black culture.” The unnamed narrator achieved fame and commercial success as a teen actor but has grown disillusioned with Hollywood. She meets Francisco, an independent filmmaker, and becomes enraptured, increasingly sublimating her own creativity in favor of nurturing his. They crash in guest rooms and living rooms up and down California, living a bohemian life, making love, listening to James Brown, and arguing about who has sold out. The prose, unfettered by punctuation or capitalization, envelops readers in the narrator’s funkified quest for meaning, love, and freedom, and whether they can all coexist (“its not so much behind every great man is a great woman, as much as a great man is a great man and a girl is a girl”). In an afterword, Newman admits she struggled with the rerelease, luxuriating as it does in a lifestyle she no longer endorses. Readers will be grateful for the raw fervor and passion found in these pages. (Mar.)