Snakes is confined to the limits of … the language of a young musician [MC] coming of age in the black precincts of Detroit, and within that perspective the presence of cruising police cars, hustling whores and dealers of various goods, the grime and carbon monoxide of the cityscape—are as naturally given as the green lawns and tennis courts in John Cheever's fiction…. [MC instinctively knows] that hung-up, hard-pressed whites have little to offer in the way of cultural and human values, that one's blackness is sufficient. Snakes thus begins … far from the extensively mapped terrain of Richard Wright's and James Baldwin's fiction…. Young's novel takes for granted, does not proclaim, the virtues of being black, virtues that are, after all, human virtues. And it is there that his fiction becomes simply what it is: fiction, fiction without the clanking prefix, black.

The subject of Snakes is music...