All Aunt Hagar's Children

September 4, 2006
Coming after the Pulitzer Prize-winning novel The Known World, Jones's second collection of stories journeys the length and breadth of Washington, D.C., past and present, for inspiration. James, stentorian and assured, sounds like an East Coast version of Charlton Heston's Moses, intoning Jones's prose like a contemporary version of the 10 Commandments. There is an odd disjunction between James's mostly uninflected reading and the heavily accented dialect he provides for Jones's characters when they speak, but James makes it work. Jones, acclaimed as one of the most talented American writers currently at work, composes smooth, measured prose that demands a reader like James, who follows the ebb and flow of Jones's stories like the score of an opera.

Starred review from June 19, 2006
Following the Pulitzer Prize–winning The Known World
(2003), Jones offers a complex, sometimes somber collection of 14 short stories, four of which have appeared in the New Yorker
. As in his previous collection of short fiction, Lost in the City
(1992), Jones centers his storytelling on his native Washington, D.C. Here, though, Jones broadens his chronological scope to encompass virtually the entire 20th century and a wide range of experiences and African-American perspectives, from a man who has kept the secret of his adultery for 45 years, to another whose most difficult task on leaving prison for murder is having dinner with his brother's family. Often, Jones presents characters who have been away from the South long enough to mourn the loss of values and connections they traded for the too-often failed promise of urban success, but he also portrays the nation's capital as a place of potential redemption, where small curses and small miracles intertwine, and where shifting communities and connections can literally save one's life. Each of its denizens comes through with his own particular ways and means for survival, often dependent on chance, and rendered with unsentimental sympathy and force: "Caesar flipped the quarter. The girl's heart paused. The man's heart paused. The coin reached its apex and then it fell."