★★★★★ (5 of 5)

• Full Title: Native Son
• Author: Richard Wright
• Year: 1940 (mine was 2005 trade paperback)
• Pages: 430/518*
• Genre: Fiction
• Publisher: Harper Perennial
• ISBN 978-0-06-083756-3 (trade paperback)
• Wikipedia page
• Author’s Wikipedia page

(* The actual text of the novel is 430 pages. Another 88 pages are introduction, essay on writing the novel, notes on the text, and a lengthy chronology of the author’s life.)

 

Summary

Native Son was Richard Wright’s first novel, after he gained national attention in literary circles for his 1938 short story collection Uncle Tom’s Children. It tells the story of 20-year-old Chicagoan Bigger Thomas, whose first name unfortunately kept making me think of a combination between the British “bugger” and the N-word. Bigger gets a job working for a wealthy white family, accidentally kills their daughter, attempts to hide the evidence, then goes on the run. The manhunt, capture, trial, and sentencing all take place within a few days.

The edition I read also had Wright’s 30-page essay How “Bigger” Was Born attached to the end, explaining how the idea of “Bigger” grew in his mind in the years before writing this, and how it grew not only from his own experiences in the Black communities of Mississippi and Chicago, but also from the U.S. labor movement and information from inside Nazi Germany and Soviet Russia.

 

Praise

I don’t consider myself qualified to explain what’s so great about this novel. Maybe it was the risk Wright took in portraying a Black man as living up to so many stereotypes already assumed by so many white people — uneducated, unmotivated, criminal, scheming, dishonest, and ultimately incompatible with society. Maybe it was how naturally Wright deployed social justice themes without waxing preachy or didactic, and how the setting itself explained the crushing societal and institutional forces that guarantee the formation of millions of men just like Bigger Thomas.

Part of me is glad I read this after I finished Ellison’s Invisible Man, because this was so much better — reading them in the opposite order would have left me disappointed. But most of me wishes I had read both of them 30 years ago.

There were no typographical errors, no wasted words, no endless exposition or descriptions. The action, interspersed with Bigger’s thought processes, moved swiftly from one scene to the next without delay and without time gaps. All the scenes were easily pictured by the reader, even someone like me who is unfamiliar with Chicago (especially 1930s Chicago).

 

Points Off For...

I couldn’t find anything to dislike about this book, except perhaps that it felt difficult for the author to express Bigger’s final epiphanies — maybe because Bigger himself took so long to get it clear in his head.

 

Conclusion

For years, I heard of Ellison’s Invisible Man as a great American novel from the Black perspective, but I don’t think I ever heard of Richard Wright. I became aware of him by reading a short story, Bright And Morning Star, in an anthology of great American short stories (which I haven’t yet finished), and the story struck me so hard that I searched Wright’s name and learned of Native Son. When I finally began to read it, close on the heels of Ellison’s book, it was immediately clear to me that I would like this one better.

The saddest part of this book is that the conditions in society that produced the Bigger Thomas of 1940 still very much prevail in 2020. After the Civil Rights movements of the 1950s and ‘60s, multiple Supreme Court decisions and new laws, and an explosion of Black talent across the pop culture landscape, in much of the United States, what I just read could be a modern novel.

(This is my first five-star rating since March, and one of only three this year so far.)

 

 

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