![]() Toussaint, haunted for much of his life by the secret of an encounter he had with King in Memphis, is discontented despite his success. Roping these flash points together is Malcolm Marcus Toussaint, a wealthy and celebrated syndicated columnist for the otherwise low-profile Chicago Post. ![]() ![]() The action in “Grant Park” is split between two outsize moments in the history of American race relations, a clean 40 years apart: the day of Obama’s election to the presidency, in the fall of 2008, and the lead-up to the 1968 Memphis sanitation workers’ strike that culminated in the assassination of Martin Luther King Jr. The president isn’t the only icon Pitts attempts to make real. “Grant Park,” the third novel from the Pulitzer Prize-winning, nationally syndicated Miami Herald columnist Leonard Pitts Jr., might be best understood as an early salvo in the effort to encase Barack Obama in the amber of lasting literature. But another, perhaps higher, test of any cultural figure’s staying power is how well he fares in the realm of the purely or partly imaginative. ![]() Our country’s first black head of state has already, of course, come alive on the pages of his own books, as well as in a growing cottage industry of unauthorized portraits, from the paranoid to the all-but-exhilarated. ![]() Maybe it’s time, here in the twilight years of a history-making presidency, to consider the possibilities for what we might come to call Obama Fiction. ![]()
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