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Right of Passage is an autobiographical novel and a good deal more. It is an historical novel about a stormy time in American history: the challenge to Jim Crow hegemony in the South in the 1960s. It is a sociological examination of an African American's effort to navigate a dangerous, oppressive world with some dignity and the subtle and varied effects on family life. At times, it seems to belong in the realm of existential literature (i.e., Sartre and Camus). One might see similarities with The Stranger in the way each protagonist pushes forward. But they are also different. Meursault, the stranger, inexplicably stabs an Arab. In Jenkins' novel, Chris has a moral compass that will not allow such a thing. Suicide is an underlying theme in The Stranger, whereas Chris always pushes into life with some sense of inner goodness. It is not hard to surmise where this reserve comes from. His mother held him tenderly to her soft, ample breast, so we can assume reasonably secure attachment. But more than this, there was an early embodiment in the world of nature. On the first page we see Chris scrambling after collard greens with his mother, as they squish their toes into the soil with delight, speak to the trees and being spoken to in return. The beauty Chris finds in nature, along with the music of Brahms and the great poets of all ages, come to settle inside him and offer resilience in navigating the terrain of a brutal society. What Chris achieves is a way of being with others that opens the way to falling in love and that implicitly underlies the psychoanalytic relationship at its best.
Lee Jenkins is a retired English professor and licensed psychoanalyst, so he is well qualified to handle this broad spectrum. Although Jenkins is not strongly associated with a “school” of psychoanalysis, Chris's way of being with others suggests the shift from regarding the patient as an object of study being transformed in a certain way to sitting with a patient, forming a dyad of two m