The Books 20 Years in the Making
In 1999, Gayl Jones published a book that reads the way jazz sounds. Her fourth novel, Mosquito, is an ambitious, experimental riff that blends historical and philosophical beats and finds connections between U.S.-Mexico border tensions and the Underground Railroad. Mosquito displayed the wide-ranging talents of a writer heralded by Toni Morrison and fresh off a National Book Award nomination. It was also the last novel Jones would publish for more than two decades.
What makes a writer wait decades to publish? What does that time do to the stories, a six-volume work that focuses on a settlement of Black Brazilians, the mystique of her absence was as compelling as her sprawling historical fable. Her linguistic invention, honed over the course of a patient career, is as when Morrison, then an editor at Random House, first encountered her writing in 1974.
