Rage in the Blood
A Father’s Law, by Richard Wright
HarperCollins, 320 pages, $14.95
Reviewed by Darryl Lorenzo Wellington
The year 2008, the centennial year of Richard Wright’s birth in Mississippi, brings the publication of a new novel, left unfinished at the time of his death in Paris. A Father’s Law is an existential novel; a psychological detective novel; a policier (as the French call police stories) in which the cop and his suspect are linked by chains of blood—thus making both, in an ancestral sense, guilty. Or innocent? Take me to the next review
If you believe you already “know” Richard Wright, if you’re exclusively familiar with the texts Native Son and Black Boy—books that established Wright as this country’s first major black literary artist, an artist born into poverty, yet smart and lucky enough to escape the Jim Crow South and pen books that struck a blow against American racial oppression—then you may find yourself perplexed by the topsy-turvy world of A Father’s Law. The Richard Wright of the established canon was a social realist protest writer of the Chicago school, an important voice against racial injustice. Race is an ambiguous motif in A Father’s Law, and the very concept of justice, whether racial, social, or human justice, is called into question.
Richard Wright was always a complex literary artist, and the label “protest writer” has to some extent obscured this. The idea of a “real Richard Wright” is as simplistic as the idea of a “real William Faulkner” or a “real Vladimir Nabokov.” Yet A Father’s Law is very much a novel of Wright’s second period. Any account of Wright’s legacy will have to balance his meteoric rise to fame as a protest writer alongside the ambiguities of his subsequent career. And A Father’s Law is very much a novel of Wright’s second period.
Having established himself as a major literary voice in America, Wright chose in 1947 to move to Paris. From there, Wright’s expatriate writings reflected his attempt to internationalize himself, to push beyond the borders of the United States politically, aesthetically, and philosophically. He published important books of political science concerning postcolonial Africa; he coined the phrase black power. He immersed himself in existentialist thought (as explicated by his personal acquaintances Jean-Paul Sartre and Simone de Beauvoir.) The very titles of his books indicated a discernable shift: His Native Son, published in 1940, was written in America while his first major work after moving abroad was The Outsider (1953).
The Outsider was the magnum opus of Wright’s expatriate period—but a disastrous critical failure in its time. It attempted to unify existential, social, and ethnic themes; themes of racial alienation and universal aloneness as well as Wright’s insights into cold war politics, capitalism, communism, and social organization as his perceptions were forged by his specifically Negro American experience. Though a strained novel (no wonder), The Outsider was a respectable attempt to pen a philosophical novel in the tradition of the black idiom. Its flaws, aside from an overly ambitious grasp of multiple topics, include wordiness, plot contrivances, sexism, and a heated emphasis on melodramatic violence.
What is interesting is that very similar criticisms were lodged against Wright during his earlier phase. Balancing the ledger, critical confusion over Wright’s legacy can be summed up as this: The early Wright penned melodramatic tales of social protest, while in his next phase Wright wrote melodramatic parables of man’s supposedly existential condition. Wright’s melodramas justify themselves at their best, but at their worst they seem almost gloatingly violent. (James Baldwin and many others accused Wright of an unhealthy, almost sadistic fascination with violence.) In Native Son, the impoverished Bigger Thomas kills by accident and flees the punishment which he doesn’t deserve, yet in the course of his flight kills again in cold blood. Cross Damon, the middle-class hero of The Outsider, is an unrepentant killer.
In the stories that fit comfortably into Wright’s protest novelist period—including all the novellas of his first book, Uncle Tom’s Children (1938)—his heroes are legitimate victims. They’re oppressed, or worse than oppressed, destroyed by social institutions. In other tales, though, Wright’s heroes are something more than exclusively victims of society. They’re catalysts of violence. Though they have been wronged by the social order, they’re victims of something awry in the human condition, or victims of themselves. In Wright’s hands, a misogynist, misanthropic killer like Damon can still make windy but not completely unconvincing existential arguments for his cosmic “innocence.”
Wright identifies with his legitimate victims, his oppressed poor, his falsely accused; but to the consternation of his critics, this social protest writer identifies just as deeply with characters like Damon. The underappreciated Richard Wright is a keen observer of the cracks that lie between guilt and innocence and a parabolist of law and order in a godless universe.
Recently released under the aegis of Julia Wright, the author’s daughter and estate executor, A Father’s Law shares many themes with The Outsider. It is, fittingly, a father-son parable. The two central characters are bound together; if one hand has committed acts of evil, then both hands must suffer the psychological torments and worldly consequences.
In the story, the father, Rudolph “Ruddy” Turner, is a Chicago police officer (symbol of justice, authority, and order); the son is Tommy Turner, a brilliant, shy college student, with a burgeoning interest in law enforcement himself. Their relationship is weak. We learn that Ruddy “had never been able to erect the kind of healthy father-and-son relationship he had always dreamed of and wanted.” Ruddy is frankly unnerved by his intense, emotionally reserved progeny: “He could not help but regard his son somewhat in the same light that he held the criminals he questioned each day. . . . There was that withholding of something vital from the outside world that Tommy shared with the lawbreakers Ruddy dealt with day in and day out.”
After he is appointed police captain of one of the city’s white precincts, Ruddy sees his career ascend. Although he is outwardly a social pillar, inwardly Ruddy is self-conscious and conflicted—a black American nervously maneuvering in a white world. In the novel’s most revealing passage, Ruddy reflects upon his somewhat delinquent years before he joined the police force, his adolescent resentments, and his life now as a stalwart law enforcer, or a man with an efficient façade:
He had been seethingly race-conscious in those days, and while hunting jobs that did not exist, he used to curse the look of a world that excluded him, damn it to hell for the mental tension it evoked in him, and he used to long to collar the smooth, smug, clean-shaven white men who passed him with their well-fed bodies. He had had wild daydreams then; he was the head of a black invading army who would conquer a city like Chicago. . . . Yet Ruddy knew while he was deep in these hot daydreams that nothing like that would ever happen, but there was left in him, nevertheless, a sense of guilt. This was a guilt for deeds he had never done but had wanted to do. And he knew in his heart that that was the worst kind of guilt, for he could never tell anybody about it. It sounded too silly, too much like the talk of children. . . . How did one talk of a guilt that came from not doing the things that one wanted so much to do? . . . And this guilt was nameless, without a face, without solidity. . . . Yet one felt it in the pores of one’s skin; . . . How well he had hidden that guilt during all of these long years on the police force! Of that he was proud. He was known far and wide as a fearless police officer. Yet the containment of that tension had been his greatest accomplishment.
While the father projects his internal feelings of guilt upon his suspects (“Ruddy Turner had found, to his amazement, that it was this hidden sense of guilt that aided him in ferreting out breakers of the law”), the son self-obsesses, internalizes, even freezes over emotionally. Ruddy has always been put off by his son’s cold intellectualism. Now he faces the prospect that he may have sired a killer.
The gist of the story is Ruddy’s investigation of a string of bizarre murders in close consultation with professional police psychologists; he is simultaneously distracted from the task by concern over his son’s failed relationship with a fiancée. Ruddy finally confronts Tommy over his quirky behavior and his relationship with one of the murder victims—and reels when he discovers that his son is a miniature sleuth, albeit with bizarre ideas on murder and motive.
“Dad,” explains Tommy, “what I’m going to say to you will sound wild and crazy. . . .You ask me: ‘Why was Charles killed?’. . . The question is: ‘What is it that keeps people from killing Charles?’ . . . Why should not Charles Heard be killed? I’m simply calling to your attention that there just does not now exist in this state or nation any real hindrance to the killing of the thousands of Charles Heards.”
The clues add up, and they point to Tommy. Ruddy’s son confesses—not to the murders, but to an armed robbery. It’s clear that the confession is false. Now Ruddy is trapped in a quagmire: Is his son guilty of nothing? Or guilty of the unspeakable? Is he seeing false clues, biased against his flesh and blood? Or is he refusing to accept a preordained conclusion? Is Tommy mentally disturbed, but innocent? Or mentally disturbed and morally culpable?
A Father’s Law reads like an episode of L.A. Law written by Kafka. Like Ruddy Turner, Wright’s engaged readers follow a trail of clues. Though A Father’s Law is unfinished—the story breaks off inconclusively at page 268 like a cliffhanger episode of a television show that’s suddenly been canceled—it’s clear that the narrative is a continuation of Wright’s project to unify his sense of life’s existential foundations, his vision of life as an existential malaise riddled with oppressive guilt over fulfilling or failing to fulfill meaningless responsibilities, and his black American heritage. Sufficient clues are dropped to unravel the real mystery. Ruddy Turner, “ guilty” of racial duplicity, investigates his son Tommy Turner, “guilty” of succumbing to feelings of rage, depression, and alienation. The father and son are the ego and the id. In metaphor, Ruddy and Tommy are not two guilty souls, but one. And in metaphor they sketch a likeness of Richard Wright himself.
Wright’s emphatic fascination with violence—bloody, homicidal violence—has legitimate roots, most of them obvious. There was the violence of his own early life, masterfully delineated in Black Boy. There was the violence endemic in the laws of Jim Crow, the violence of lynchings and burnt bodies. Wright’s childhood imagination was scarred by the Jim Crow South. His early Jim Crow melodramas were based in fact.
Wright was also attracted to murder as a novelistic theme given the stark power with which murder makes us question society. Murder is a dramatic device par excellence. Murder demands our attention; it forces us to make decisions about society, justice, and the limits of social acceptance. Wright was too much of an artist to oversimplify the social and psychological forces that have an impact on human nature, and the social judgments we make regarding fairness, the vagaries of human nature, and the boundaries of personal responsibility. Native Son is a no mere piece of polemic; it becomes an important novel because Bigger Thomas’s crimes sit in a tantalizingly nebulous zone between socially induced criminality and personal psychopathy. Wright uses the violence of the ghetto—and America’s prurient fascination with violence—to make certain that we cannot just sit back and pass easy judgment. Is Thomas guilty? And, if he is criminally guilty, is he morally less guilty than society?
But The Outsider is another matter. In the latter part of his career, Wright appears less interested in violence as a metaphor for investigating issues of social justice than in identifying specific forms of aberration that can lead men to commit murder. He frames this investigation as “existential.” If Wright were a mystery writer, he would have framed his investigation into the motives of crime and guilt as criminological. But can we reduce this book to strictly existential or criminological terms? Or might A Father’s Law be Wright’s most psychologically revealing novel?
If so, is that why A Father’s Law is one of the best of Wright’s expatriate works? It stands just a notch below his masterful story “The Man Who Lived Underground” (1942). It is superior to The Outsider for being shorn of the earlier novel’s weighty philosophical rhetoric. The earlier novel sank under the weight of straining for grand significance. By attempting so much, the characters became automatons, chessboard pieces in a story without impetus. The Outsider heavily privileged Wright’s intellectual development, but it lost touch with his emotions.
A Father’s Law, on the other hand, gains momentum by splitting Wright’s persona into two characters in a scenario that metaphorically reveals Wright’s personal dilemma. The dilemma was “existential” insofar as the guilt feelings that his characters suffered were irrational; but I suspect that Wright’s ritualistic absorption with the expiation of guilt feelings was by and large personal. At the beginning of the murder spree in A Father’s Law, Ruddy office is deluged by innocent citizens who feel the need to make false confessions. A criminal psychiatrist explains the phenomenon. In his words, many innocent people suffer from “a mood of guilt that was repressed long, long ago.” Was this Richard Wright?
Just as the “real” Wright was a literary artist, A Father’s Law cannot be completely reduced to mere psychobiography; yet the confusions of Wright’s later work invite this type of interpretation, and it cannot be ignored that A Father’s Law strongly suggests the “guilt” that Wright pursued like a dog chasing his tail led to an immersion in existentialism—even an identification with criminals rather than victims. He was not, like Ruddy Turner, pursuing his own son, but rather his own shadow. His early life of deprivation and struggle, his flight from Mississippi, even the eventual success that allowed him to flee the United States (but separated him yet again from the American black community, or a normal sense of place) fed his intense hunger for knowledge, but saddled him with just as intense repressions.
It should be considered that this conflict of the inner self, confusing the need for achievement (or attention) with feelings of self-abnegation, was hardly uncommon among minority members of Wright’s generation. Its debilitations were examined in the “the double consciousness” of W. E. B. DuBois and described by Franz Fanon in his 1952 book Black Skin, White Masks. Wright’s guilt was as weighty as Kafka’s. And like Kafka, Wright used his art as the catharsis for his personal torments. Kafka sympathized with his persecutors; Wright became his killers. •
Tales from the Box Store
The Jew of Home Depot, by Max Apple
The Johns Hopkins University Press, 184 pages, $19.95
Reviewed by Nancy Carr
Whenever I took Max Apple’s new story collection on the El, I found myself hunching over the book or shielding the cover with my bag, to prevent anyone from seeing the title. Maybe I was overreacting, but I didn’t want to give unintentional offense and end up trying to explain to an angry fellow commuter why I was reading something called The Jew of Home Depot.
Yet the provocative title, with its echo of Christopher Marlowe’s The Jew of Malta, is perfect for the collection. It is Apple’s great virtue to bring the kind of storytelling frequently labeled “old-fashioned” into the 21st century, where brand names and multinational corporations are simply part of the landscape. Anyone wishing to understand today’s United States in general and the southwestern portions of it in particular will learn more from The Jew of Home Depot than from any sociology course, television show, editorial-page rant, or blog. Apple’s ability to tell tales that are both timely and timeless recalls Pound’s dictum that “literature is news that stays news.”
The stories in The Jew of Home Depot, largely set in Florida, Nevada, or Texas, invite comparison with Sherwood Anderson’s Winesburg, Ohio. Like Anderson, Apple shows us how the big questions—Who am I? How did I end up here? What can give my life meaning in such circumstances?—reverberate in the most ordinary lives. Apple understands that these questions play out in specific moments, in the aisles of home improvement box stores or the vinyl booths of restaurants with laminated menus. In story after story, he captures the whole of such scenes: the comic details, the depth of emotion, the striving after something more. Without pressing, he makes us feel the human dignity of his characters and his compassion for them.
Apple also understands that underlying every demographic, whether ethnic, religious, or national, there are individuals who connect or fail to do so. In “Indian Giver,” one of the collection’s best stories, Apple depicts a struggle between Seymour Rubin, the Jewish owner of an auto salvage business, and Alonzo Johnson, the only employee who can keep the metal baler operating. When Seymour walks into the baler room one lunchtime and finds Alonzo conducting a Muslim prayer group, the dialogue between the two men illustrates how the conflict between Jews and Muslims looks on the small stage of daily American life:
“Is my baler room a church?”
“On Fridays from twelve to one,” Alonzo said. “It is a mosque.” We pray and the men don’t bring no pork in their lunches. Little by little they’re learning.”
“What are they learning, to hate me?”
“Not you,” the baler operator said. “I told everyone at the beginning that the Jew is not Seymour Rubin. You ain’t responsible for your people, Seymour.”
“How long has this been going on,” Seymour asked, “your once a week anti-Semitism?”
After firing Alonzo, Seymour suffers the predictable business woes resulting from a perpetually broken baler, and embarks on efforts to enlist the Jewish community in supporting his decision. He asks his chief competitors, also Jewish, to buy a parcel of cars from him, only to be told that “when it’s tough for you it’s good for us. That’s business.” When Seymour asks the rabbi to tell the competitors to cooperate, he is informed that “business strategies are not a rabbinic area.”
What makes “Indian Giver” so interesting is Apple’s refusal wholly to endorse the point of view of any character within it. He is fascinated by the ambiguity of people and their relationships, not in advancing an agenda. Seymour is sympathetic when he asks his competitors to help him “because you owe that to another Jew” who has fired an anti-Semite, but the competitors point out that Seymour took business from them in the past, and that when he did, they did not ask him, “How can you do this to Jews”? Alonzo also proves to be a sympathetic character: When Seymour suffers a hernia while trying to hit Alonzo with a sledgehammer as he fires him, Alonzo donates blood to his former employer. Apple’s resistance to easy answers emerges clearly in this conversation between Alonzo and Seymour’s wife:
“If I knew he was lying on the ground and hurt bad, I’d have come back. I got nothing against Seymour. Jews is another story.”
“You’re anti-Israel?” Phyllis asked.
“I am on the side of my oppressed Arab brothers.”
“And you really told Seymour that Jews are scumbags?”
“I told him there were exceptions, and he was one.”
The eventual resolution of “Indian Giver,” in common with that of the other stories in The Jew of Home Depot, is satisfying because it grows convincingly out of the characters and their interactions. The larger issue is not resolved, but that too is satisfying, because of the storytelling honesty.
In fact, the stories are so good that it is difficult to discuss only some of them. They resist generalizations, because Apple’s gift is so much for the revelatory specific. His use of brand names, for example, recalls the “Kmart realism” associated with Raymond Carver, Ann Beattie, and others in the 1980s, but Apple more skillfully suggests the comedy and tragedy of moments of great significance taking place in a thoroughly brand-named landscape. In the story “Yao’s Chick,” for instance, we find this description of Li En, the 20-something daughter of Vietnamese Americans, on a date arranged by her mother with a college student:
He said “bingo” when he found a parking spot directly in front of Red Lobster. While they waited for their meal, Earl took out his Game Boy. When he did something good with his thumbs he held out the screen to show Li En. ”You want a turn?” he asked.
Li En understood that this was her marriage opportunity.
Apple is not laughing at Li En and Earl, but simply showing us how one couple might go out today in Dallas, Texas. Li En is right about this encounter being her “marriage opportunity,” and Apple makes her readiness to settle for Earl simultaneously understandable and heart-wrenching.
Understated humor combined with affection for his characters is an Apple hallmark. In every tale—even the weaker stories “Sized Up” and “Threads”—he seems to revel in discovering his characters. It never feels as if he has created characters or situations to demonstrate a preconceived point, but as if author and reader are watching the characters, waiting to see how it will all work out. Pointed observations abound in the stories but are often anchored in other characters’ perceptions, not given the full weight of authorial statement. Thus the main character in “Peace” thinks that his business partner is “happy enough with his Corvette and his boat. He wanted his life to be like a beer commercial, only in slow motion.” Apple also has first-person narrators analyze themselves, as when the rabbi in “Stabbing an Elephant” tries to resolve a religious-school dispute, only to see that he falls short whether he compares himself to a biblical figure or to the rabbi who held the position before him: “I had King Solomon’s example before me, also Rabbi Solomon’s. . . . I had neither the wisdom of old Solomon nor the adventurous spirit of young Solomon.” The hope that inheres in these stories, despite their often grim circumstances, derives from the characters’ ability to understand themselves and feel for others, even as they are caught in circumstances they cannot control.
This theme is most apparent in “Strawberry Shortcake,” in which a middle-aged son takes his mother, her caregiver, and her next-door neighbor to lunch at Denny’s. Explaining how Sidney Goodman came to put his mother in a retirement home, Apple distills years of grief into four sentences:
In the early stages, Sidney flew down to Orange County more often, took the car first, then the credit cards and the checkbook. It went slowly. Two years before he’d had to hire a day companion and then two more years of troubleshooting from distance. When it became an everyday problem he decided to bring her to Vegas.
The scene at Denny’s epitomizes what caring for a loved relative, whose impairments make her almost unrecognizable, can cost the caregiver. Sidney’s mother, suffering from advanced Alzheimer’s, insists on strawberry shortcake, but Denny’s is out of strawberries that day. Attempts to explain this only enrage her, and Sidney calculates whether he can get her out of the restaurant:
Sidney kept his cheerful look and calm voice, but he was considering a quick strike, a reach across the booth to pick her up like a child having a tantrum. . . . By the time they got to IHOP she wouldn’t remember anything; he knew that. She wouldn’t even want the strawberry shortcake. But for now the cake had become the meaning and purpose of life. By now Sidney knew that.
What Sidney has come to know is the knell that sounds through the story. His willingness to go on taking his mother out and his patience in the face of her unmoored fury are quietly, convincingly heroic.
Given the frequency with which elderly, impaired mothers and their middle-aged sons appear, the reader may wonder how extensively Apple is drawing on his own life in these stories. But Apple proves, by his ability to animate fully all his characters, whether male or female, young or old, Jewish or not, that he is that rarest of things, a writer who can show us something new and true about ourselves, whoever we may be. The Jew of Home Depot does not trade in heroes, villains, platitudes, or comfortingly conventional storylines. Instead, it offers illumination. •