By
Vanessa Francis
Arizona Daily Wildcat
"Not a Day Goes By" hampered by weak characters
Grade: D
Despite its phenomenal success as a new bestseller, "Not a Day Goes By," by E. Lynn Harris, a well-known gay black author, is a thinly developed, contrived novel.
The main character is Basil, a young, attractive and up-and-coming sports agent living in New York City who is in constant struggle with his flip-flopping sexuality. He is engaged to Yancey, a diva-Broadway star who will stop at nothing to marry Basil and his sizable checking account as soon as she can.
Yancey's mother Ava is an even more vindictive version of her daughter, as she eagerly investigates Basil's personal life to gauge his worthiness as a prospective son-in-law. This is where the main character's problems essentially begin, but the writing problems begin promptly on page one.
Harris has created a 271-page account of how many ways women are worse than men. It is a book where the women are evil, painted Jezebels and the men are understanding and sensitive.
The one chance of redemption for the female gender, according to this book, is their clothing and hair, which Harris goes into aggravatingly close detail about on almost every page.
Harris is an avid college sports fan and that certainly shows within the text. There are numerous references to coaches, players and college towns with relation to Basil's career and clients. The problem here is that college athletes do not have agents, so therefore Basil would have no such relation to them as the text implies.
The novel is set in the present and is very up-to-date on popular trends. Basil adheres to the Atkin's low carbohydrate diet, and in one scene Yancey vies for a part in the HBO series "Sex and the City."
Harris has been welcomed by the gay community with open arms as a ground-breaking author. His work does frankly discuss the issues of homo- and bisexuality, but the story is still weakened by one-dimensional characters, each speaking in unoriginal dialogue and sharing his obsession with beauty, perfection and material goods.
If this is a story about love, it is about the love between a man and his silk sheets rather than a man and his lover.
The book is written in such an elementary fashion that anyone with a sixth-grade education could understand it. To assume his work is worthy of merit would be asinine.
Despite the number one status it currently holds on the bestseller list, E. Lynn Harris' "Not a Day Goes By" is overrated.
