Sitting Pretty
by Al Young

Covering one year in the life of the narrator, the book opens in a down and out hotel where he lives folks such as Miz Duchess, a tough but lovable Cherokee woman who dines on Alpo; Willie G., who goes from working in the junk yard to fashionable security guard at a modem art museum back to the junk yard; Broadway, a flashy young man who ends up busted for cocaine; and the silent and intuitive Professor. As we follow their exploits we watch the narrator’s fights the often humorous fights battle of the bottle. We see him go to jail for unpaid parking tickets and gets bailed out by his lawyer son; establish contact with his wife after years of neglect only to discover that she has developed cancer and become famous pitching T.V. and radio shows. He chases several women along the way while exposing himself to radical black poetry. The action keeps the book going along at a fast clip, but the value of Sitting Pretty is in the narrator’s "philosophizin." His insights are grounded in the experience of black America, yet they are universal enough to make this a novel of wide appeal