City of Light joins the recent reissues of four of Cyrus Colter's books by TriQuarterly Books/Northwestern University Press. Colter concludes his grand literary project with a work that is foremost a novel of ideas. Though City of Light may appear realistic in setting (contemporary Paris), with a well-differentiated cast of believable moment, each character nonetheless represents an idea or a position regarding the issue of race in American life.The ideas or positions range from black nationalism, drawing upon African models and an Afrocentric political position, to complete assimilation, presented here by the central character's love affair with a white woman.Paul Kessey, at age twenty-nine, is caught between two worlds. Although his is a privileged world of successful blacks in Chicago, and he is a graduate of Princeton, handsome and well-connected, Kessey is uncertain how to identify himself in relation to the African diaspora, partly because of his own light skin. Throughout his Parisian sojourn, he is both attracted and repelled by different ideas, attitudes, and concepts regarding the place of blacks in a white society; he goes back and forth among the persons -- and the ideas they represent -- and thus among contradictory possibilities of life as a black man.By intertwining in an intricate web racial, class, and political issues with the intense struggles of one man's heart, Colter presents a vivid portrait of the personal effects of prejudice and its hypocrisies. City of Light remains a daring push against the grain of American literary fashion, both in its method and in treating interracial relationships, Afrocentrism, and the black middle class.
