Review: Threnody - a poem or song of mourning or lamentation
Rating: 5 out of 5
Date: 03 29, 2014
Jason Akley grows on you, or grows into you, or at least makes you reconsider how stories can happen in a way that bathes the reader's mind with exquisite prose, as comfortable in stream of conscience ramblings about spaces or sounds or the other entries to senses. At the same time he can spin a story so palpably real that we are pulled into a timeframe and a place and a familiarity with characters so that metaphors and analogies simply seem right, seem natural, seem focused. He writes about historical ideas as reincarnated in his own character creations. So how did this Tulane graduate in physics and mathematical economics change partners to dance with a muse? Who cares? He did, and that is enough.THE PSALMIST by title and by the author's own suggestions suggests a story that may try too hard to be compared with the lives of two historical characters: Robert Leroy Johnson (1911 - 1938) was an American blues singer and musician, a natural who combined singing, guitar skills, and songwriting talent that has influenced later generations of musicians. Johnson's shadowy, poorly documented life and death at age 27 have given rise to much legend, including the Faustian myth that he sold his soul at a crossroads to achieve success. As an itinerant performer who played mostly on street corners, in juke joints, and at Saturday night dances, Johnson had little commercial success or public recognition in his lifetime. Although the cause of his death is still unknown, there have been a number of theories offered, the more prevalent one is poisoning by strychnine.  The other character influencing this story is the biblical King David as the psalmist. Most of his individual psalms involve the praise of God - for his power and beneficence, for his creation of the world, and for his past acts of deliverance for Israel. The psalms envision a world in which everyone and everything will praise God, and God in turn will hear their prayers and respond. Worst of all is when God "hides his face" and refuses to respond, because this puts in question the efficacy of prayer, which is the underlying assumption of the Book of Psalms - that book is divided into five sections, each closing with a doxology - these divisions were probably introduced by the final editors to imitate the five-fold division of the Torah. And this is the format of Akley's THE PSALMIST - five books incorporating 33 chapters - another indication of his respect for the history of literature, of all the arts.Akley's THE PSALMIST tells the story of a blues musician named David Threnody, who was `born in an apartment above a pawn shop on 129 N 8th Street in East St. Louis, Illinois...in winter, the 28th of February 1918.' Akley shares the history of David's parents before embarking on David's own life as a child through his exposure to music to his move into the field of blues in New Orleans. As with the above references characters David Threnody walks through the exposure of drugs, alcohol, the law, tense familial relationships, the vagaries of love - all fodder for his molding his life into blues songs, songs that ultimately share a wisdom of life's travails and the impact of those experiences as made manifest in the lyrics and delivery of the Blues. He keeps a journal, a source for some of Ackley's finest writing, so in the tonality of his character's fragile mind.`Take a sad song and make it better', the Beatles advised. With Jason Akley the facts of his character's life are molded at the end into a description of his death - and it is here that we gain yet more respect for this exceptional author's gifts. We are left in pain, but understanding it. Grady Harp, March 14