Reviewed by Deatra Haimé Anderson

J. California Cooper’s wily gift is being able to preach the gospel of fine and righteous living with aplomb and good-natured humor. In her fourth novel, Some People, Some Other Place, she takes on the daunting but always timely mission of reminding us that we are surely doomed without hope and a sustained belief in possibility that must always be fueled by good deeds and fierce morality. And as is her way, she gives us so much to chew on that our jaws hurt by the end.

Cooper uses an unborn child-spirit to narrate (and often preach) a far-reaching tale that spans four generations of a poor black family that sustains disappointment after disappointment in their quest to find a better way of life. Her great grandparents left the poverty of the deep south to make their way to a farm in Oklahoma; her grandparents continued the journey north in search of jobs in the prospering industrial Midwest but were forced to settle long before reaching their goal. Her mother, Eula Too, who’s story dominates the novel, keeps putting one foot in front of the other until she arrives, at last, on Dream Street, which, of course, is a standard Cooper tongue-in-cheek and is a painfully obvious reminder of our collective quest to live happily ever after.

It is impossible to enjoy Cooper’s writing without sustaining disbelief. Her characters find themselves in extraordinarily unlikely circumstances and are gifted with uncanny bouts of luck. After deciding to leave her family’s dreary share-cropping life at the tender age of 16, Eula Too heads to Chicago with a man for whom she has performed sexual acts for money over a period of time and for some reason trusts him, despite his untoward motivations. Low and behold, bad things do indeed happen but she is rescued by a wealthy brothel owner/madam who literally changes the course of her life. A similar twist of fate happens later in the novel when one of the residents of Dream Street escapes indentured servitude in China by becoming a mail-order bride and magically manages to get to the United States. These grand fortunes are a bit frustrating and make Cooper’s story feel more like a fable than a straight-ahead novel, which is both charming and nagging. We want to learn the lessons, but wonder how realistic they are when turns of events are often otherworldly.

Cooper’s real genius, however, is her ability to centralize the human experience. Her cast of characters is a motley crew that spans ages, races, occupations, and sensibilities yet we recognize something of our- selves in all of them. That they converge, finally, on Dream Street, and are tied together in determining their fate is the ultimate melting pot metaphor that reads more like a nice idea than a reflection of grim reality. Cooper gets away with trying to pass fantasy off as realism because she writes with such fierce passion that the truth she desperately wants to us to learn and ultimately believe is irresistible. Some People, Some Other Place is a call for us to keep the light of hope shining on our best selves.