| Fear and cheating in Los Angeles
If Harris is the king of black popular fiction, Dickey is the crown prince. What he lacks in media appearances, Dickey makes up for in mass appeal. Dickey may not have Harris' intimate knowledge of the finer things but he is a better storyteller. Compared to Harris' more staid and classy black, the hot pink cover of Cheaters has all the class of cheap supermarket romance. That is to say, not much, but it piques your interest all the same. With so many characters, so many simultaneous plots, and so much sensation, the novel is the most convoluted soap opera Los Angeles can imagine with an all-black cast. Surprisingly, Dickey manages to weave all the people and plots together into a highly energetic read. Where Harris skimps on character development, Dickey lays on thick the intimate detail--not an easy task for a novel with eight influential characters. Cheaters focuses on Stephen Mitchell, a successful businessman who dates lots of women. Stephen blames his infidelity on his father's behavior and struggles through the novel to balance his libido with feelings of guilt. Enter Chante Harris, a strong woman with an equally large sexual appetite. Chante loves sex, but she also loves her men and keeps getting hurt. Swarming around Stephen and Chante is a host of other black thirtysomethings who are similarly trying to make it work in the Los Angeles dating scene. There is a lot going on in Cheaters--at times too much--but Dickey manages to keep his readers on track. By providing several scenes where his characters have a chance to interact in a manner much more inviting than Harris' insular world of black movers and shakers, Cheaters can examine the emotional and physical side of cheating. Dickey manages to make us care about the relationships in his book. Though Stephen and Chante's relationship takes up the most space, the other plots are more complex and interesting. We learn about the growing pains in a relationship when Darnell, one half of the successful couple Dawn-and-Darnell, revaluates his career decisions, with a disappointing reaction from his career-driven wife. The lives of Karen and Tammy, Chante's close friends, counterpoint Chante's self-centered world--they both have weathered family and career setbacks and sundry crises. Charlotte and Jake are the novel's most unfortunate couple--Jake habitually cheats on Charlotte, insisting that she doesn't know or care, and Charlotte tolerates his behavior. More sexual partners that come and go as Dickey's cast flirt and sleep their way to a highly emotional finale. Whether Dickey is detailing the difficulties of the relationship-defining talk between Chante and Stephen or illuminating the intense jealousies that can exist between good friends Karen and Chante, he demonstrates a particular talent for capturing the myriad of emotions involved in close relationships. At the same time, he often weighs his novel down with pages of long, unnecessary conversations that add nothing significant. Dickey also seems aware of his own awkwardness as a writer. He often tries too hard to make simple situations into to complex, literary passages. Dickey is not shy with his love scenes; he piles on loads of detail that could be too much for a bashful reader. But he also is skillful at portraying the complexities of a sexual relationship--in Dawn and Jake we find the difficulties of marriage and the temptation of an extramarital affair. Dickey carefully weaves his way through a plot that could have easily led to an overabundance of already generous sex scenes and manages to end his story with touching honesty. Charlotte demonstrates what happens when a woman has suffered too much and Jake proves that sometimes men really need to be taught to love. It isn't a tidy ending so much as one that forces each character to reevaluate the way they have operated in former relationships. At the end of the novel, as Stephen and Jake contemplate their newfound solitude, there is a sense of sadness not only for the women that they hurt but also for the nonchalance with which they approached those relationships. Cheating may not seem like much of an anomaly to today's readers but the characters in Cheaters show the damage that it can do to friendships, families, and marriage. Dickey's novel rings with a sort of authenticity, that even a shock-proof audience can find altogether too real. The black, the bourgeois, and the beautiful Homo-thugs and credit card woes Fear and cheating in Los Angeles |