![]() ![]() Putting the reader inside the head of a similarly troubled kid in a 300-plus-page novel is a much more difficult task. In that poem Sapphire’s fierce language created a disturbing portrait of a troubled adolescent, so damaged and unhinged that he is capable of going out and beating a stranger half to death. Frohnmayer as chairman of the endowment in 1992. ![]() The poem, which included a reference to Jesus and oral sex, appeared in an obscure magazine that received funding from the National Endowment for the Arts, and was cited by conservative critics as part of a campaign that led to the dismissal of John E. The Kid, a k a Abdul Jamal Louis Jones, happens to be the son of Precious, the long-suffering heroine of Sapphire’s 1996 debut novel, “Push” (later made into the acclaimed film “Precious”), but he bears less of a resemblance to his mother than to the rage-filled teenager depicted in Sapphire’s controversial poem “Wild Thing,” which was inspired by the 1989 beating and rape of a Central Park jogger. After being tossed out of school for sexually assaulting another student, he begins a series of peregrinations around the island of Manhattan in search of a self and a vocation. The Kid, the title character in Sapphire’s unsettling new novel, is an orphan, an aspiring dancer, an abused child and a violent offender. ![]()
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