JUICE!

The boundary that separates fact from fiction is the terrain on which iconic African-American writer and Neo Hoodoo-ist Ishmael Reed's political satire JUICE! is set. Paul Blessings, aka Bear, is a political cartoonist obsessed with the O.J. Simpson trial and the unchecked outpouring of racist rhetoric it continues to unleash in the mainstream media to the present day. Bear's belief in Simpson's innocence—especially in the face of the ready-to-condemn media—alienates him from his friends, family, and co-workers, but he remains convinced that Simpson is a scapegoat, and that the attacks on him are part of a larger persecution of all black men. However, the troubles Bear gets into at work and home for his stance—in other words, the fictional part of this book—feel slight when compared to the profusion of actual cited articles and sound bytes that Reed has assembled to make his case for Simpson. Added to this, in his withering screeds against the press and its manufacturing of facts, Reed inexcusably trots out a lot of sexist, bigoted content of his own, and though this is "only a novel," there isn't much offered to contextualize these points of view beyond a knee-jerk, quid pro quo rationale. Ultimately, JUICE! functions best as a brave look at the under-reported side of a game-changing media spectacle and as an indictment of the slanted spectacle of the media itself.