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Dancing In The Dark
A Novel
by Caryl Phillips
'Dancing' presents a fictionalized look at the life of Burt Williams (1874–1922), a vaudeville performer who was the most famous black entertainer of his day.
Knopf, 224 pages
09/13/2005
$23.95
ISBN: 1400043964
Fiction
General Literature & Fiction
All reviews are classified as one of five grades: Outstanding (4 points), Favorable (3), Mixed (2), Unfavorable (1) and Terrible (0). To calculate the Metascore, we divide total points achieved by the total points possible (i.e., 4 x the number of reviews), with the resulting percentage (multiplied by 100) being the Metascore. Learn more...
Daily Telegraph Max Davidson
It is a lovely novel, psychologically astute and rich in period detail, and the best thing Caryl Phillips has written.
The Guardian Zoe Green
Caryl Phillips's novel tells their story with sensitivity and eloquence. He is a consummate storyteller with a sweetshop of anecdotes, but is always moving the narrative forward.
The Independent Margaret Busby
This compelling novel does not flinch at the distorting social prism that shapes racial identity, a hall of mirrors that reflects back extravagant strangers.
The Independent Catherine Taylor
This is a tragic story with not a word wasted, raised to an elegiac level by Phillips's supple, controlled prose.
Entertainment Weekly Tom Sinclair
The profoundly sad impression left by this speculative tale is that Williams was as much a stranger to himself as to those around him, a stoic who kept his pain so deeply shuttered he couldn't bear to confront it directly. With Dancing in the Dark, Phillips has exposed that putative anguish to the light of day, where it shines, brilliantly. [16 Sep 2005, p.91]
Publishers Weekly
The whole is suffused in Phillips's brilliant, if here filigreed, light. [11 Sep 2005, p.56]
Kirkus Reviews
The author's depiction of the culture's racial dynamic will surely cause a stir. [15 Jun 2005, p.661]
The Spectator William Brett
Phillips' strengths lie in careful characterisation, instinctive powers of description and above all a comprehensive understanding of racial identity. Dancing in the Dark displays these qualities admirably.
Village Voice Anderson Tepper
A taut psychological study.
Washington Post Elizabeth McCracken
It's almost as though Phillips is too respectful of his subject's need for privacy, onstage and off. In the history of American entertainment he is a cipher. Unfortunately, he does not come much clearer here.
The Guardian Tabish Khair
Though it perhaps lacks the force of Phillips's best work, this is an accomplished novel about the tyranny of "true" colours.
San Francisco Chronicle Joshua Jelly-Schapiro
The novel can't be called anything but a success. The world it creates is vivid, the themes it raises poignant, the questions it prompts precisely the ones it should.
Boston Globe Anna Mundow
Artfully compresses [Bert] Williams's life without reducing it in any way.
Boston Globe Richard Eder
The author tells [the] events in a blurred and sometimes disjointed fashion. He can be a polished writer, but in recent years he has adopted a deliberate raggedness of narration and sequence, one that makes use, as a reviewer has written, of fragmented narrative for polemic purposes.
Los Angeles Times Ahmad Wright
Phillips illustrates the subtleties of the black theater pioneers, their aspirations, their ascension, their frustrations and their complexities as artists and as men. [13 Dec. 2005, p. E6]
The New Yorker Claudia Roth Pierpont
It is hard to say how much of the book’s restricted emotional tone is a result of Phillips’s dramatic intent--as though to let go of suffering for a moment would be to discount it--and how much a result of his own attempt to keep from exploding over his hero’s resignedly unheroic choices.
New York Review Of Books Darryl Pinckney
Maybe Dancing in the Dark... shows that as academic theorists become ever more triumphalist concerning the elevation of vernacular culture, the black novelist as alternative historian is free to return to the nobility of defeat as a grand theme.
Daily Telegraph Bharat Tandon
Phillips has written an excellent essay on Marvin Gaye in which the singer realises that "he must play the part that has been assigned to him... a Mephistophelean pact." At its best, this novel reimagines a comparable pact; elsewhere, though, it feels too much like superior docu-drama to sit alongside Phillips's most accomplished work.
The New York Times Book Review Brooke Allen
"Dancing in the Dark" is filled with compelling factual nuggets. But when Phillips frees his imagination and exercises his license as a novelist, the book loses force.
TLS: The Times Literary Supplement Michael Caines
In spite of the striking images... there is a general absence of detail, and a monotony of tone, that ultimately make Dancing in the Dark a less engaging work than Caryl Phillips's essays in autobiography and travel.
The Globe And Mail [Toronto] Andre Alexis
Dancing in the Dark is a mediocre book by a talented writer. It fails, ultimately, as a novel and as fictionalized biography, but it still manages to demonstrate some of Caryl Phillips's skill.
 The average user rating for this book is 7.0 (out of 10) based on 1 User Votes
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