A FATHER’S LAW

Name: A FATHER’S LAW
Author: Richard Wright
ISBN: 978-0-06-134916-4

by Richard Wright ‧ RELEASE DATE: Jan. 8, 2008

Wright did not live to resolve the dilemma thus created. Furthermore, A Father’s Law is astonishingly awkwardly written, and...

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When Richard Wright (1908–60) died, much too young and essentially a stranger in his own country who had found a more congenial “home” in postwar Paris, he was remembered, if at all, as a transitional figure. Between the handful of respected black American authors (such as Charles W. Chesnutt, Claude Mackay and Langston Hughes) and the later, more abrasive achievements of James Baldwin, Toni Morrison, John Edgar Wideman and others, there were Wright’s major books. His powerhouse debut novel Native Son, the bitter short stories collected as Uncle Tom’s Children, the impassioned autobiography Black Boy—all now enshrined in the Library of America—bore electrifying witness to the enduring relevance of a writer who made it his life’s mission to dramatize his people's struggles against racist intolerance and injustice.

Now comes A Father’s Law, a never-before-published, unfinished novel. The book was written during Wright’s last illness, which perhaps explains its ungainly, virtually inchoate state. In an introduction to the work, Wright’s daughter, Julia, candidly describes it as a “faulty, sketchy, sometimes repetitive draft.” The book attempts something genuinely new in his oeuvre—a metaphysical crime thriller—and it eerily echoes its author’s own experience. The story begins when veteran black Chicago policeman Rudolph “Ruddy” Turner is summoned to his station late at night and informed that he has been appointed Police Chief. The complication: A series of unsolved murders in the “independent municipality” of Brentwood Park, a hotbed of gambling, prostitution and worse, has become a number-one police priority. Ruddy’s problems are exacerbated at home, in his troubled relationship with his college-age son Tommy, a gifted student and athlete whose renegade intellect questions the legitimacy of laws his father is sworn to uphold—and gradually raises Ruddy’s suspicions that Tommy is implicated in the murders. For Tommy, like the young Richard Wright, has broken off his engagement to a girl afflicted with congenital syphilis (the story is briefly told in Michel Fabre’s 1993 biography The Unfinished Quest of Richard Wright). Was Tommy driven to crime, his father agonizes? Or was he attempting to seek punishment he felt he deserved, even for crimes he did not commit?

Wright did not live to resolve the dilemma thus created. Furthermore, A Father’s Law is astonishingly awkwardly written, and would surely not have been offered for publication without major revisions. Still, it lurks in Wright’s harsh oeuvre: a perhaps impenetrable enigma. We cannot salute it as major, even as significant work. But we can understand why Julia Wright thought we needed to see it.

Pub Date: Jan. 8, 2008

ISBN: 978-0-06-134916-4

Page Count: 288

Publisher: Perennial/HarperCollins

Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010

Categories:

LITERARY FICTION

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THE MOST FUN WE EVER HAD

by Claire Lombardo ‧ RELEASE DATE: June 25, 2019

Characters flip between bottomless self-regard and pitiless self-loathing while, as late as the second-to-last chapter, yet...

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Four Chicago sisters anchor a sharp, sly family story of feminine guile and guilt.

Newcomer Lombardo brews all seven deadly sins into a fun and brimming tale of an unapologetically bougie couple and their unruly daughters. In the opening scene, Liza Sorenson, daughter No. 3, flirts with a groomsman at her sister’s wedding. “There’s four of you?” he asked. “What’s that like?” Her retort: “It’s a vast hormonal hellscape. A marathon of instability and hair products.” Thus begins a story bristling with a particular kind of female intel. When Wendy, the oldest, sets her sights on a mate, she “made sure she left her mark throughout his house—soy milk in the fridge, box of tampons under the sink, surreptitious spritzes of her Bulgari musk on the sheets.” Turbulent Wendy is the novel’s best character, exuding a delectable bratty-ness. The parents—Marilyn, all pluck and busy optimism, and David, a genial family doctor—strike their offspring as impossibly happy. Lombardo levels this vision by interspersing chapters of the Sorenson parents’ early lean times with chapters about their daughters’ wobbly forays into adulthood. The central story unfurls over a single event-choked year, begun by Wendy, who unlatches a closed adoption and springs on her family the boy her stuffy married sister, Violet, gave away 15 years earlier. (The sisters improbably kept David and Marilyn clueless with a phony study-abroad scheme.) Into this churn, Lombardo adds cancer, infidelity, a heart attack, another unplanned pregnancy, a stillbirth, and an office crush for David. Meanwhile, youngest daughter Grace perpetrates a whopper, and “every day the lie was growing like mold, furring her judgment.” The writing here is silky, if occasionally overwrought. Still, the deft touches—a neighborhood fundraiser for a Little Free Library, a Twilight character as erotic touchstone—delight. The class calibrations are divine even as the utter apolitical whiteness of the Sorenson world becomes hard to fathom.

Characters flip between bottomless self-regard and pitiless self-loathing while, as late as the second-to-last chapter, yet another pleasurable tendril of sisterly malice uncurls.

Pub Date: June 25, 2019

ISBN: 978-0-385-54425-2

Page Count: 544

Publisher: Doubleday

Review Posted Online: March 3, 2019

Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2019

Categories:

LITERARY FICTION | FAMILY LIFE & FRIENDSHIP

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HOUSE OF LEAVES

by Mark Z. Danielewski ‧ RELEASE DATE: March 6, 2000

The story's very ambiguity steadily feeds its mysteriousness and power, and Danielewski's mastery of postmodernist and...

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An amazingly intricate and ambitious first novel - ten years in the making - that puts an engrossing new spin on the traditional haunted-house tale.

Texts within texts, preceded by intriguing introductory material and followed by 150 pages of appendices and related "documents" and photographs, tell the story of a mysterious old house in a Virginia suburb inhabited by esteemed photographer-filmmaker Will Navidson, his companion Karen Green (an ex-fashion model), and their young children Daisy and Chad. The record of their experiences therein is preserved in Will's film The Davidson Record - which is the subject of an unpublished manuscript left behind by a (possibly insane) old man, Frank Zampano - which falls into the possession of Johnny Truant, a drifter who has survived an abusive childhood and the perverse possessiveness of his mad mother (who is institutionalized). As Johnny reads Zampano's manuscript, he adds his own (autobiographical) annotations to the scholarly ones that already adorn and clutter the text (a trick perhaps influenced by David Foster Wallace's Infinite Jest) - and begins experiencing panic attacks and episodes of disorientation that echo with ominous precision the content of Davidson's film (their house's interior proves, "impossibly," to be larger than its exterior; previously unnoticed doors and corridors extend inward inexplicably, and swallow up or traumatize all who dare to "explore" their recesses). Danielewski skillfully manipulates the reader's expectations and fears, employing ingeniously skewed typography, and throwing out hints that the house's apparent malevolence may be related to the history of the Jamestown colony, or to Davidson's Pulitzer Prize-winning photograph of a dying Vietnamese child stalked by a waiting vulture. Or, as "some critics [have suggested,] the house's mutations reflect the psychology of anyone who enters it."

The story's very ambiguity steadily feeds its mysteriousness and power, and Danielewski's mastery of postmodernist and cinema-derived rhetoric up the ante continuously, and stunningly. One of the most impressive excursions into the supernatural in many a year.