The “central theme of Major's life and career … is a story of paradox,” Keith E. Byerman writes in “Performing Transgression, Seeking Community,” the introduction to The Art and Life of Clarence Major, the surprising first full-length bio-critical study of “an artistic renaissance man” (2). The consensus of his peers and of many critics of contemporary African American literature is that Major is one of the most prolific, multitalented, and scholarly underacknowledged artists of his generation. Byerman reminds us, “He has been part of twenty-eight group exhibitions, has had fifteen one-man shows, and has published fourteen collections of poetry and nine works of fiction” (1).

This book is a surprise for at least two reasons. First, it is long overdue. I expected the first full-length study to be published by a junior colleague whom I have been advising since my guest editorship in 1994 of the second special issue on Clarence Major in the African American Review and my significant expansion of that issue in 2001, which Byerman neglects to examine. Following my introduction, “Clarence Major's Transgressive Voice and Double Consciousness as an African American Postmodernist Artist,” it showcases selections from his novels (5), poems (13), and paintings (16), with commentary by critics (10) in Clarence Major and His Art: Portraits of an African American Postmodernist. For many readers, The Art and Life of Clarence Major will be as much a surprise as a disappointment that it is more illuminating and impressive for its critical insight about the subject's transgressions as an artist than as a person.

The book includes twenty-one compelling illustrations and seventeen paintings, as well as an introduction, nine chapters (two on postmodernism), and a conclusion. Byerman seeks to demonstrate that Major, on one hand, defines “both his life and his art as transgressive of conventions,” and on the other hand, “sought approval from and connections to those who could appreciate who he is and what he does” (2). Byerman therefore intriguingly and boldly declares that his task is “to follow the multiple layers of problems and solutions in both the work and the life, to consider the successes and the failures” (4). He believes that Major has received little critical attention because he largely ignores conventional definitions of black masculinity and black literature and is therefore difficult for critics to classify and analyze.

Disappointingly, however, Byerman, a specialist in African American and women's studies, reinforces rather than challenges the stereotype of black male identity choices as being “either a beast or an imitation white man” (5). Readers learn, for example, that Major was married four times and that his “first two marriages were disasters, in part because he was trying unsuccessfully to settle into a middle-class career” (3). Despite his access to the archives of the Fiction Collective, Ronald Sukenick, Russell Banks and Major, as well as to Major's generous cooperation and candor in interviews and emails, Byerman provides no specific information about these “disasters.” And we learn little or nothing about Major's problems with his wives and six children.

Perhaps this biographical weakness occurs because Byerman relies too heavily on interviews by himself and others with Major, as well as on the artist's “postmodern memoir” of his mother Inez in Come by Here (2002). Inez was a light-skinned southern woman who occasionally passed for white after abandoning her two children for four years and moving to Chicago in order to escape an abusive husband. Reconstructing the story of Major's black-and-white family and tracing the connections, Byerman writes, “often requires following genetic lines rather than birth and death certificates and census records” (6). But crosschecking the oral with the available written records of Major's wives and children would have enhanced the authority, ironies, and paradoxes of this book.

We do discover, however, that Major married his first wife, Joyce Sparrow, in 1958; his second, Olympia Leak, apparently in 1964; his third, Sharyn Skeeter, a poetry editor for the popular black women's magazine Essence, whom he met in 1970 and about whom we learn most, in 1975; and his fourth and current wife Pamela Ritter in 1980. Most revealingly, perhaps, Sharyn told an interviewer that Major had a serious drinking problem before their divorce in 1978. We also learn that “the first two children he had with Olympia Leak were born while he was still married to Joyce Sparrow” (2). He fathered four children with Leak.

Some readers will ask, how were his failures at marriage related to his early problems with alcohol and bohemian defiance of definitions of black masculinity during the black power and black arts movements, whose political art-for-people's-sake aesthetic he rejected? And how was his early abandonment of wives and children (none lived with him after his second divorce in 1966) relevant to his avant-garde ambitions and consistent art-for-art's-sake argument that “the primary responsibility of the artist is to the art” (5)?

Byerman tells us sympathetically that Major was “dissatisfied with his responsibilities” and “found that the price of supporting a family was too high: it would cost him a career as an artist” (248). But we do not hear from Major's family or friends about his specific irresponsibilities as a husband and father. Byerman does tell us, however, that in Dirty Bird Blues (1996), his most commercially successful novel about love, Old Crow Bourbon, and blues, Major seems to suggest “an idealized version of the artist's life. Devotion to one's art solves all problems. It enables one to see beyond race, beyond exploitative labor, beyond personal traumas and the ways of suppressing them” (211).

Readers will therefore find The Art and Life of Clarence Major a provocative, informative postracial bio-critical study that complements Bell's Clarence Major and His Art. Unlike Bell, Byerman highlights the paradoxes of the protagonist who represents the ideal artist in Major's last novel, One Flesh (2003), and how his “will, persistence, and individualism” are similar to his mother's in Come by Here (248). He also traces Major's networking experience with little avant-garde magazines and his multitalented achievements with the experimental writers in the Fiction Collective as a transgressive, postmodern artist. Arguably, the most impressive contribution of this new book is Byerman's close analysis of the structural and stylistic interconnectedness of Major's paintings and novels. The most radically transgressive examples of this relationship and Major's painterly identity as a postmodernist occur in Reflex and Bone Structure (1996) and Emergency Exit (2006), his doctoral writing project with Jerome Klinkowitz on his committee. Emergency Exit includes twenty-six black-and-white reproductions of his paintings in which landscapes, characters, colors, and the names of Van Gogh and Goya are disrupted and destabilized in their representational and nonrepresentational appearance.