PRAISE FOR
The Mitt Man

The New York Times
The time is pre-World War II in America, and the setting of The Mitt Man, Mel Taylor's combustible first novel, is the racial frontier of Southern life. A smart grifter known as King Fish, who lives on the treacherously jazzy margins of New Orleans black society, gets caught trying to pick the pocket of an outsize white racist preacher named Malcolm Cage. While pointing his stacked-barrel derringer at him, Cage sees the spark of genius in King Fish and decides to turn him into a preacher.

"You're different, ain't you?" is the way Cage expresses his conviction about the man who just tried to rob him. King Fish "ain't like no" black man "I ever met," Cage tells him. "Shows in your eyes."

So begins Taylor's raw and rowdy tale of corrupted ambition and racial tragedy, which stretches from Baptist revival meetings to the malignant interior of a Southern chain gang. The Mitt Man is a strong debut by a writer of rough-edged power who, according to the publisher's publicity notes, spent a decade or so in prison himself and won a long battle against cocaine addiction before turning to fiction.

The Mitt Man is part "Cool Hand Luke," part "Elmer Gantry," part "Invisible Man," with a dash of "Midnight Cowboy" for good measure. As an artistic whole, it is marred by a maudlin ending and an occasional loss of narrative control. But overall, "The Mitt Man" -- the term refers to a con artist who exploits the religious fervor of his dupes -- is a fine, pulsating story whose roots go deep into the violent, primordial American racial cataclysm.

Two figures dominate the action of Taylor's book. One is King Fish, who is already in his late 30s when we meet him at the Bucket-of-Blood, a seedy black club on the outskirts of New Orleans. King Fish is "a true 'slickster,' a skilled pickpocket and cardsharp" who uses Scripture, in partnership with his lady friends, to disarm his victims and gain a kind of racial advantage.

"In a small twisted way," Taylor writes, King Fish's scams "struck a blow for the colored race, proved colored folks were smart after all." When King Fish is set up as a preacher by his victim-turned-benefactor, Malcolm Cage, he sees the situation as an opportunity to continue the hustle. King Fish "believed this crazy cracker could show him the way to big money."

Taylor's other main figure (along with a large and vivid cast of minor ones) is Jimmie Lamar, whose path crosses that of King Fish's in prison, where he learns the finer arts of cardsharping and other swindles from the master. Jimmie is a very different character from King Fish. He is from Ohio. He was a football star in high school and college. He goes to New York to make his fortune, but there he is swept up into a world of easy sex, nightclubs and street hustling not all that different from the older King Fish's down South.

When an act of impetuous vengeance brings the career of King Fish to an end, he passes the torch to Jimmie, whom he instructs in the mitt man swindle. But Jimmie, who begins this new career with the necessary cynicism, becomes trapped in a complex psychological web of greed, guilt and creeping religious conviction. He ends up in a corrupt muddle reminiscent of the disillusioned visions of Sinclair Lewis or Theodore Dreiser.

Two other related themes haunt Taylor's boisterous story. The Mitt Man is saturated with the spiritual and psychological calculus of race. Almost all of Taylor's characters are lined up along the spectrum of racial attitudes and actions. Cage is a patronizing sort of racist who seeks to return black society to a kind of benevolent plantation, complete with segregated forms of spiritual solace. But he changes, largely under the influence of his wife, Lorene, who grew up on a real plantation and understands, in advance of her time, the nature and dimensions of the South's moral blindness.

At the heart of the tragedy of The Mitt Man is the undying racial unfairness of American life, which makes for an interesting paradox: Both King Fish and Jimmie Lamar are petty crooks, but both run afoul of the law for actions taken outside the boundaries of their usual grifters' lives.

The other theme is sexual. Taylor gives play to several full-blooded female characters in The Mitt Man who play parallel roles in the lives of their violent, impetuous men. The women position themselves along the same cynical starting line as the men. Jimmie Lamar is introduced to the hustle by a woman named Masaya, who is already a seasoned pro when they meet.

But the women are quick to arrive at a point of moral reawakening that turns out to be impossible for their men. The result for the women is either redemption or loss. Whatever the result, the divide that separates them from their men in this novel is a kind of parallel version of the yawning racial gap that separates the men from the American promise.

"Ain't but two kinda people in the wurl,' " King Fish tells Jimmie Lamar in prison. "The ones that gives and the ones that takes, and know'n what ya gonna be is the difference between bein' a player or suckuh." Taylor's book gives a full understanding of that attitude, but it is also a tumultuous, profane fable on why it is inadequate as a guide to life.
-- Richard Bernstein

Kirkus Reviews
Feverishly overwritten and densely plotted but nonetheless strongly compelling African-American southern gothic of a cardsharp whose scams against friends and foes become a metaphor for the paradoxical nature of religious faith. Born around 1900 into a poor farming family on the outskirts of New Orleans, James Cook runs away from home when he sees his father fatally beaten by a white sheriff who had designs on Cook's mother. Though well-schooled in the Bible, the boy can't accept a world in which God seems to permit black people to be savaged. And so he flees to the city, where he soon becomes the King Fisha pimp, a pickpocket, a true slickster like his hustler uncle Ed. While visiting the black shantytown of Gator Creek, he falls for the innocent affections of Sue Ellen, who not only marries him but follows him into a life of petty crime, then leaves him when he won't have a family with her. King Fish next begins trafficking with the mad Reverend Malcom Cage, a wealthy white fundamentalist preacher whose missionary work often serves to swindle disaffected blacks. As a preacher, he learns both sides of the scam but yearns for a better life among Harlems swank cats. A return to his hustling ways lands him in prison, though, where he discovers that, even if he doesn't believe in God, he has the power to redeem others. Once out of the slammer, King Fish makes his way to Harlem, then undergoing its famed renaissance. There, he meets Jimmie Lamar, the storys narrator, who, despite a few wayward tendencies, feels that God has handed him a charmed life. He and King Fish try (optimistically) to defraud a wealthy French countess, but the scheme goes sour and Lamar loses the woman he lovesalong with his ability to preach. Discursive, overly complex, but, despite occasionally cumbersome prose, a debut that makes a moving statement about redemption and loss.
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