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• 1 2016-02-18T06:23:44-08:00 Jake Lamar and Rendezvous Eighteenth 44 An introduction to Jake Lamar plain 237841 2018-11-26T14:51:51-08:00 Jacob “Jake” Lamar III was born in the Bronx, New York in 1961. His early education was in a parochial and a private school in the Bronx, where in the latter he was exposed to writers such as Jean Toomer, Langston Hughes, Countee Cullen, Richard Wright, Ralph Ellison, James Baldwin, Toni Morrison, and Angela Davis. His interest in writing and literature flourished in high school as he continued to write creatively. At Harvard, he wrote for the Crimson and completed his bachelor’s degree in American history and literature. Upon graduation, Lamar worked as a staff writer for Time. Initially, he wrote in the Milestones section of the magazine. Milestones were stories written within 145 characters and contained “a weekly tally of the deaths and childbirths, marriages and divorces, indictments and convictions of the famous and infamous” (Bourgeois Blues 116). Lamar also wrote features that appeared in the back of the magazine and in Nation; the latter was Time’s most prestigious section.
  
  After six years as a staff writer for Time, Lamar published his first book Bourgeois Blues: An American Memoir (1991). Bourgeois Blues was ahead of the African-American memoir trend of the 1990s. Other memoirs during this period include Jill Nelson’s Volunteer Slavery: My Authentic Negro Experience (1994), Nathan McCall’s Makes Me Wanna Holler: A Young Black Man in America (1994), James McBride’s The Color of Water: A Black Man's Tribute to His White Mother (1995), and Barack Obama’s Dreams from My Father: A Story of Race and Inheritance (1995). At the center of Bourgeois Blues is Lamar’s relationship with his father and how his father and his own experiences connect to national issues. These issues include economic racism, particularly the hindrances to Lamar’s father securing generational wealth through entrepreneurship; “white flight” in the context of the changing demographics of Lamar’s Bronx neighborhood during the post-Civil Rights Era; affirmative action and the “old-boy network” with regards to Lamar’s access to an ivy league education and employment at Time; interracial relationships in New York during the 1980s based on Lamar’s observation of his father’s interracial relationship and Lamar’s own experience; and the influence of the African-American liberal, specifically Lamar’s employment at Time during the Reagan administration.
  
  Although Lamar did not receive many reviews for Bourgeois Blues, the reviews the memoir received were positive. In 1993, Lamar won the Lyndhurst Prize for Bourgeois Blues, and with the award, he decided to live in Paris and write for a year. He came to Paris because of its history of being a creative haven for American writers. His first three books written in Paris The Last Integrationist (1996), Close to the Bone (1999), and If 6 Were 9 (2000) deal with politics and current events in the United States. His two subsequent novels Rendezvous Eighteenth (2003) and Ghosts of Saint-Michel (2006) make up the Paris series and the former is the novel that concerns this chapter. Since the publication of his Paris series, Lamar has written a play about the well-known dispute between Richard Wright and James Baldwin (with Chester Himes present) called Brothers in Exile (2013). He has read excerpts of this play for audiences in Paris. Also, Lamar’s latest published novel Postérité /Posthumous (2014) is the first novel he has written in French.[1] This novel departs from the thriller/crime fiction genre and African-American subjects. Posthumous is set in the Netherlands, New York, and California and is a non-linear narrative of Toby White, an art historian, who is writing a biography of a Femke Versloot, a fictional Dutch Abstract Expressionist painter.
   

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  [1] Posthumous is published in French by Rivages; it has yet to be published in English.