Every once in a while, it can be a lot of fun—as well as quite enriching and satisfying—to pick up a novel by an author about whom you know next to nothing and read that novel in a vacuum, with blinders on, your mind a completely blank slate. In this way, all opinions and critical estimations formed must come from the text and the text alone; outside influences only become pertinent insofar as they can be derived from what's on the page. The degree to which our opinions about a work in any of the arts comes from prior knowledge, or from buzz, is often quite surprising. How our evaluations may shift once we know a little about the author's life, or the circumstances in which the book was written, the weal that influenced the appearance of the book—all this and more has bearing on the threshold of understanding. This is obvious. Yet, there is something very attractive and seductive about confining the universe of appreciation to the text, the whole text, and nothing but the text. In the book Beginning Theory, Peter Barry summarizes this method of criticism:

I think this approach is greatly facilitated (and made easy) when the work in question seems to have flowed smoothly and naturally out of the author's being, effortless and true. It's much harder to adopt when a work seems too forced, too ambitious, too determined to prove a pre-ordained thesis ( for example—and this is a novel that I love—something like Eugene Izzi's A Matter of Honor).

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In this spirit of inquiry, I looked at Julian Mayfield's The Hit. The 'hit' of the title refers to hitting the numbers, something many of the characters in the story try to do on a daily basis, or, at least, whenever they have money to bet. The scene is Harlem in the 1950s, the cultural and intellectual center of black life in New York and, perhaps, in all of America. In spite of the fact that many of the secondary characters aren't fully flushed out and are presented in scenes reminiscent of German Expressionism, the neighborhood, itself, almost becomes a character—familiar, eternal, predictable, containing scenarios readily recognizable to anyone with even the most throwaway acquaintance with New York neighborhoods ("A fire engine, hooting and clanging, roared down Lenox Avenue.") Indeed, Mayfield selects another of Manhattan's most instantly identifiable phenomena, the taxicab, as an important part of the story.

Hubert Cooley is the superintendent of a few apartment buildings in Harlem. His wife Gertrude "helps" him—in quotes because it is she who appears to do most of the work while Hubert loafs and daydreams. They have a grown son, James Lee, who still lives with them. Immediately, on the first page, Mayfield takes pains to make Hubert detestable as he has absolutely repellant thoughts about both his wife and all his neighbors. Thus, "Hubert Cooley had but one obsession, and that was to leave family, home, and Harlem as far behind as possible and create a new life for himself. He had lived with this idea for more than five years." He plans to be able to access this new freedom by playing the numbers. His brand of idiosynchratic theology is repeated a few times: he believes that God owes him the the hit, and that it will come in due time. He also believes it's his right to be able to abandon his family and run off (he yearns for San Francisco) with a woman. And he holds these beliefs in spite of the fact that he's failed at business over and over again and has never shown any sign of being a capable, loving spouse and/or parent. He truly is one of the most deluded characters in all literature! The sources of his delusions are manifold; some are commonly employed devices of psychological explanantion in fiction, others not. As the story begins, Hubert is thinking what a mistake it has been for him to have married Gertrude and stayed with her for twenty-five years. Out for a walk, he has dismissive, contemptuous thoughts of all the residents of his block. He stops off to visit Sister Clarisse, a friend who will figure greatly in his pathetic dreams later on; he loiters in Central park, wises off to a racist cop, and gets tossed in jail for the night. There, he has a dream instructing him to play the number '417'.

His son, James Lee, comes to bail him out. Mayfield describes him: "James Lee Cooley was blacker than the average American Negro. His was a liquid, whole blackness. He was a little over average height and gave the impression of being a dark reservoir of strength." However, we soon learn that "There was not a single area of his life that was going as it should." His parents and their marital crumble are certainly issues, but his girlfriend Essie is his greatest challenge. James Lee has been wounded in Korea and, a couple of times, he scratches at the physical wound when it itches, mirroring the psychological wounds that need care as well. Essie is, essentially, a decent girl; unfortunately, James Lee has a wandering eye for the ladies and can't hide it. More unfortunately, the abortion that he insists she have drives an irreparable wedge between them.

Father and son are both portrayed as selfish consumers of pleasure, relentlessly seeking their own satisfactions while their women suffer. Essie is strong enough to sever the ties. We follow the chain of events: James Lee leaves Essie to go get Hubert out of jail, but he runs into some friends and some fast women and doesn't come back all night; he goes to apologize and, in the ensuing argument, raises his fist to pound Essie but catches himself; Essie leaves—not only New York City, but James Lee—rejecting him as he pleads with her at the literal door of her train. In a strange twist of irony, the bookmaker who will crush Hubert's dreams is boarding the identical train. Gertrude is not so lucky. In one chapter, Mayfield affords us a quick glimpse into her thoughts. While Hubert is off in his fog and James Lee is out carousing, she assumes the super's duties around the building (and fights off the roaches in the apartment). She knows that Hubert means to leave her but she cannot figure out why, or what went wrong between them. She's devastated by the lifelessness of their marriage, the subjugating drone of boredom it has become:

Her life is unwound by her blind faith in the institution of marriage, just as her husband's will be by his blind faith in the institution of the numbers game; they are destroyed by the very things they hope will save them. In a moment, we'll look at the substantial role the numbers game is given, but the generational differences Mayfield introduces are important to consider as well.

James Lee is an NYC cabdriver. In his rush to pick up fares (he's way behind for the day because he was late to work in the morning; he was late in the morning because of his philandering), he causes an accident and, because of the accident, he gets into a fistfight with the white dispatcher back at the cab company. James Lee leaves him whipped, for dead, then, in turn, is beaten badly by the bookie who cheats Hubert when he tries to stop him from fleeing. In the end, having lost both his job and his girl, he comes to a kind of self-knowledge that his father, so much older, has never been able to attain. Watching Essie's train roll away, he feels "strangely happy for her"; his maturity has become such that, even though he is pained to lose her, he knows it's the proper course. He knows that he can make a life for himself in Harlem. In what is perhaps a little bit of a contrivance, he recalls the words of a fellow soldier in the hospital, the controversial McGowan, who said: "You've got to keep thinking for yourself...it's your only hope." Essie arrives at similar self-discovery when she decides to leave; she can't, in her heart of hearts, forgive James Lee for the abortion. The point is that the young people make the right decision whereas the older couple, Hubert and Gertrude, did not:

As to the numbers—it seems that everyone, everywhere, plays. The bookie, John Lewis, is the most well-known man in town. Unfortunately for Hubert, he's also a cheat. Figuring Hubert has absolutely no chance whatsoever of winning when he plays '417', John Lewis simply pockets Hubert's bet and doesn't even bother to enter it into the game (by the way, Hubert only has the means to bet by stealing money Gertrude has put aside for paying bills). In one amazing sequence, Mayfield lets us peek at the private monologues of five people—not characters within the scope of the main fiction, at all—and what amounts to their prayers of desperation that their numbers hit. ("And so the great dream machine was wound tight.") In a second revealing sequence, when we learn that '4' is, actually, the first number to come up, we follow the chain of communication from a beauty shop to a pimp to a shoeshine man to a cop to an old woman hanging out of her window and "The word went out from thousands of apartments and shops and stores. It crackled through the streets like electricity. People held up four fingers, whispered it out of windows, and tapped four times." Somehow, this ends up in tall downtown buildings, among business executives. It's sort of an early, crude version of today's Powerball lotteries—but all encompassing, existing everywhere, universally. That Hubert believes God is going to give him his reward in this life via this wild roll of the dice is sufficient indication of his insanity (as is his belief that Clarisse, who's never shown him even the most remote romantic interest, will run away with him) . In the very final scene, it's hard not to be moved as Hubert stands in front of his building, his suitcase packed, waiting for John Lewis to show up with his winnings, as he murmurs defiant soliloquies to the unresponding night.

The Hit is a largely forgotten work that has, as noted earlier, a quality of having been produced almost without effort, like Mozart's music—wholly believable, with well-defined major characters, artfully outlined supporting casts, and, perhaps most important, a firm sense of place and roots and how each relates to individual human lives.