‘Comeback Choir’ Sociological Document
“Singing in the Comeback Choir” by Bebe Moore Campbell (Putnam’s Sons, $24.95, 374 pp.)
Black women buy books and like to read about themselves. It took publishers forever to figure this out, but they finally got the message, and black readers are now among the most aggressively courted market segments in the book business.
Hence the full-court press behind Bebe Moore Campbell’s “Singing in the Comeback Choir,” a Book-of-the-Month Club Main Selection whose author is being sent on a 20-city tour: Putnam, Campbell’s publisher, obviously smells money. I can see why, for “Singing in the Comeback Choir” is a piece of cliche-ridden commercial claptrap. Yet it is also something of a sociological document, and worth reading - well, skimming - for that reason alone.
Maxine McCoy, the newly pregnant heroine of “Singing in the Comeback Choir,” is the executive producer of an Oprah-style talk show whose ratings are in a slump; her marriage is in trouble, and her grandmother, a washed-up jazz singer, has started hitting the bottle again. If you can’t guess the rest, you haven’t seen enough made-for-TV movies, but what makes all this mildly interesting is the fact that the characters are black, and thus inhabit a parallel cultural universe.
Maxine habitually refers to herself as “Maxinegirl,” and her friends, lovers and acquaintances go by such names as Satchel, Sylvestina and Cocoa; though she lives in Los Angeles and works in the famously secular world of television, she goes to church and says grace before meals, and clearly feels guilty over having turned her back on the Philadelphia ghetto where she was raised.
Such conflicts could well have been the stuff of a complex, richly imagined novel about the black middle class and its discontents, except that Maxinegirl doesn’t have any discontents.
Yes, her husband cheated on her, and they’ve been having problems in bed - but they work it out and start having great sex again! Yes, her grandmother is old, sick and demoralized, and Maxine fears having to put her in a nursing home - but instead, Grandma starts singing again! Yes, “The Ted Graham Show” gets canceled - but Maxine takes the news in stride, cheerfully choosing to return to her old job as … an inner-city high-school teacher!
Granted, not all happy endings are necessarily false, but this one is as gooey as a warm Twinkie.
Small wonder the Book-of-the-Month Club is so enthusiastically hawking “Singing in the Comeback Choir”: Nothing could be more comforting to middlebrow readers, whatever their color, than a best-selling novel by a black woman whose implicit message is that you don’t have to be white to have it all.