Book Summary and Reviews of The Catacombs by William Demby

Book Summary

A gripping and genre-defying novel by a rediscovered great of twentieth-century Black American writing, about what it means to be a writer at the dawn of a new era.

First published in 1965, The Catacombs is a metafictional account set in early 1960s Rome, where the author had returned to study art history after serving on the Italian front during World War II.

African-American expatriate Bill Demby narrates his attempts to write a novel about his friend Doris, who is living in Rome and employed as one of Elizabeth Taylor's handmaidens in the filming of Cleopatra. Utterly dependent upon Doris for the development of his novel, he is both a participant in and observer of her life as she enters into an affair with an Italian count. Bill Demby's growing emotional and artistic involvement in the tumultuous affair of his character-friend leads him on an existential quest for the meaning of truth and fiction, both lived and created, in a world torn by the social upheaval of the early sixties.

Interrupted constantly by headlines from television and newspapers, slipping in and out of fiction and metafiction, The Catacombs is a time capsule from an era on the brink and a novel unlike any other.