Don't the Moon Look Lonesome Hardcover - 2000

From the publisher

As Don't the Moon Look Lonesome opens in Houston, Texas, we meet Carla, a nearly forty year-old woman, and Maxwell Davis, tenor saxophonist and jazz star, the man she deeply loves and wants to marry. Davis, who is black, now finds himself increasingly at odds with the notion of life-long togetherness with a white woman, and appears to be verging on ending their seven-year romance. They are visiting his parents, whom Carla hopes to win over as allies in her struggle to keep Maxwell in her life. Even as Carla gets to know them, we come to know her, the novel's central character, through interspersed remembrances that trace the arc of her life.

While the time frame of the novel is two weeks, Don't the Moon Look Lonesome spans more than thirty years, as it shifts backward and forward in time, evoking life in places as diverse as South Dakota, Chicago, suburban Connecticut, New York City, to Houston. The life of Carla, a talented jazz singer, has been an at once joyful and sorrowful odyssey. The many people she has met, in pursuit of her own artistic vision and authority, are uncommon, no matter how common some of their backgrounds might seem: churchgoers, preachers, intellectuals, jazz musicians, drug addicts, thugs, entrepreneurs, fashion models, blues players, high class waiters, writers, athletes, racists and so on. As she learns through living and listening, we visit malls, crack houses, church services, jazz clubs, card parties, fancy restaurants, art shows, funerals, and city streets where life is affirmed, challenged, and even murderously threatened. Clara's love affairs and sexual encounters with a South Dakota boy, a Negro bluesman in Chicago, an Irish broker in New York, countryand western musicians, a Vietnam veteran and drummer, and finally Maxwell, each reveals different things about her and around her -- the world in which those men live and work.