03/06/2023
First published in 1974, actor-turned-minister Newman’s only novel is a lush narrative of a young Black woman’s love affair with a filmmaker. The two drift through the shifting currents of art and liberation in early 1970s California, a richly defined landscape that Saidiya Hartman calls in her foreword an “atlas of black culture.” The unnamed narrator achieved fame and commercial success as a teen actor but has grown disillusioned with Hollywood. She meets Francisco, an independent filmmaker, and becomes enraptured, increasingly sublimating her own creativity in favor of nurturing his. They crash in guest rooms and living rooms up and down California, living a bohemian life, making love, listening to James Brown, and arguing about who has sold out. The prose, unfettered by punctuation or capitalization, envelops readers in the narrator’s funkified quest for meaning, love, and freedom, and whether they can all coexist (“its not so much behind every great man is a great woman, as much as a great man is a great man and a girl is a girl”). In an afterword, Newman admits she struggled with the rerelease, luxuriating as it does in a lifestyle she no longer endorses. Readers will be grateful for the raw fervor and passion found in these pages. (Mar.)
"This brilliant, long out-of-print novel was rescued by (who else?) New Directions...snappy asides and transitions appear as enjambments — pushing the pace forward like the ding of a typewriter carriage. The sensuousness is the point. This latest edition of Francisco gives a new generation of readers the opportunity to think about how little has changed in the culture industry’s relationship of convenience with Black artists."
"Mills Newman’s exquisitely distilled novel, Francisco , is the song one would expect Love to be singing these troubled days of the 1970s—a song you cannot have heard before, off-key and haunting, disturbing even in its unfamiliarity."
"When blackness, then and now, is so burdened with pain, it is a blessing to find a story of black lovers, written by a woman learning to love herself as she falls in love with Francisco."
"[Francisco ] promises to introduce a new generation of readers to Newman’s innovative and genre-bending story."
The Millions - Isle McElroy
"The novel blends vernacular riffs with cameos from Reed and Muhammad Ali, Pharoah Sanders and Angela Davis, Melvin Van Peebles and Amiri Baraka. "
The New York Times - Adam Bradley
"Francisco is a sly, poetically rendered time-capsule. Part dreamscape, part genre-fluid testimony, threaded through with an epistolary casualness, it blooms with the distinctive trappings of late-twentieth century California counterculture. Deceptively slight in size, it swirls with commentary on media, politics, class, race, a burgeoning second-wave feminism, and the flex and flare of the Black Power and Black Arts Movements. It’s about living outside the lines, but, too, it's about searching for one’s center...Montage-like and laced together in Mills Newman’s lowercase argot (part cadenced Black vernacular, part poetry), Francisco lifts off the page sentence by sentence, as if the text itself is charging forward. The scenes and situations share future/present space, fracture. Images skitter along like an art-film, shot with a hand-held camera. Characters appear, wedge a door open or find a seat, to chat for a spell before they tear off to their next adventure. They are, each and everyone, comrade or nemesis, her education."
The Back Room - Lynell George
"Francisco coincided with second-wave feminism and the Black Power and Black Arts movements, and the content and style of the book draw on those currents. The novel’s defining traits are its experimental structure and its vernacular syntax. Mills Newman writes in lilting first-person sentences that lurch and flow like a jazz vamp."
The Nation - Stephen Hearse
"Mills Newman has done the rare thing: written with beauty, power, and purity about a woman."
05/01/2023
Mills Newman's freeform autobiographical 1974 novel depicts a soulful young Black woman's search for self at the height of the Black Arts movement. Growing up a middle class child actor, our heroine has had enough of "working for a man who was makin a fortune off a people he thought so little of." Eschewing blaxploitation cinema, she has an epiphany talking with an auto mechanic with a smile "like the root of a tree, so deep, so alive.… That old Black man was music." Enter idealistic documentarian Francisco, with whom she falls intensely in love and whose blazing star she orbits from Hollywood to Berkeley to Malibu, inspired and eclipsed by her longing and devotion to him amidst the fading afterglow of the 1960s as it "seems like almost everybody has been bought." A new afterword offers a surprising yet perhaps inevitable coda to the author's spiritual quest. VERDICT A bildungsroman like no other, this fecund, funky brew evokes a memorable era of possibility and perplexity, while sounding the obscure depths of love, sacrifice, and selfhood.
2023-02-24 A poetic autofictional narrative about a Black woman artist and her relationship with an indie filmmaker, originally published in 1974.
The story follows a young, unnamed actress as she navigates 1970s Hollywood, San Francisco, and New York City. The narrative reads like stream-of-consciousness diary entries, written entirely in lowercase letters; the book’s informal spelling and grammar contributes to its offbeat charm: “i be wanderin off sometimes—and when i come back i cannot tell you where i have been, cause i do not even know i was gone.” At the heart of the novel is a relationship between the protagonist and Francisco, a young Black indie filmmaker. The narrator is transfixed by Francisco, whose commitment to his art both attracts and frustrates her. Over the course of the book, the reader is spun through a kaleidoscope of movie screenings and parties as the narrator, always in motion, flits from one residence to another and back again. In her travels, she encounters dozens of colorful characters who leap from the page with humor and specificity. Some of these cameos—Muhammad Ali, Angela Davis, and Amiri Baraka, to name a few—anchor the text in its historical context, adding the weight of hindsight to the narrative. The narrator is like all young people finding their ways in the world—at times apathetic, indignant, lost, and alone. Over the course of the novel, her disillusionment mounts, and she offers searing criticism about sex, race, and politics: “america was the wizard of oz country.” As a love story, the book is refreshingly ambiguous. The narrator can speak compellingly about Black feminism, but she allows herself to endure insults and neglect at her lover’s hands, sacrificing her own needs at the altar of his artistic greatness. The book makes space for rumination, complexity, and transience. It offers a unique window into the mind of one woman, at one moment in history, and by doing so examines beauty, sex, and art through her eyes.
Once you get into the flow of Newman’s prose, you’ll find artistic and intellectual riches.