Shedding Light On the World Through Ralph Ellison's Essays In "Shadow And Act" Is More Academic Than Extraordinary.

The Good: Excellent essays, well-supported views, wonderful language!
The Bad: Many obscure references that are overly dated.
The Basics: Buy Shadow And Act for academic opinions or for interest in jazz and literature. Not recommended as light reading or for anything other than reference.

My initial reaction as I began to write a review for Shadow and Act was to declare one of the negative aspects of the book "largely academic." What a shame it would be to put such a noble aspect into the drawback category! Ralph Ellison, author of Invisible Man and Juneteenth, had some of his best essays on sociology and literature compiled in Shadow And Act.

However, Shadow and Act is a largely academic work. With Ralph Ellison's trademark brilliance, he presents essays on music, literature and society. He does it all quite well, too. He has a wealth of education and references and his insights are often impressive and original. For example, his correlations between society and the fiction of Stephen Crane in "Stephen Crane and the Mainstream of American Fiction" present groundbreaking insights into American literature and illustrate a deep appreciation for what it is to be American.

Ellison is obviously educated and his essays are a pleasure to read on a lot of levels because he has something to say about everything and he says it well.

The drawback is that a lot of what he is writing about (jazz musician Charlie Parker, the obscure jazz guitarist Charlie Christian and a hard-to-find essay by Irving Howe whose writing Ellison presents a rebuttal to here) is out of print, obscure or otherwise unavailable. So while, through his essays, we may learn about many of these people or opinions or cultural facets, they become impossible or difficult to explore further. Moreover, if you have no interest in jazz, literature or sociology, there's nothing here that is going to get you into it.

Ralph Ellison's genius novels prove that he was a master of fiction and his essays illustrate with no lack of distinction that he could write outside fiction with consistent grace. Shadow and Act ultimately presents a wonderful collection of opinions on a sect of our history and culture that would otherwise be lost.

In the final analysis I'm recommending Shadow And Act, but solely on the basis as a reference work. It stands out as such but is not recommended for casual reading unless one already possesses a strong knowledge and interest in his subject matters.

5/10

For other book reviews, please check out my index page!

© 2010, 2001 W.L. Swarts. May not be reprinted without permission.




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That Dreamlike State Near Death: “Juneteenth” By Ralph Ellison Succeeds!

The Good: Poetic narration, Strong interesting characters
The Bad: Often confusing on a plot level
The Basics: A magically narrated novel that will be unlike anything you've put so much effort into. It's amazing how wonderful American English can be when in the hands of an expert!

The next time your computer crashes and you lose the page of work you were writing because you forgot to save it recently, take a moment and put it into perspective. You lost, perhaps a few hours of work, most of which is still fairly fresh in your mind. Then take a moment and consider Ralph Ellison, the genius writer who wrote Invisible Man (click for my review) and who had absolutely no hope of a computer miracle regurgitating the manuscript to his second novel when it went up in flames. Years of work, not so fresh in his mind, lost forever.

Juneteenth is the posthumous reconstruction of what narrative Ralph Ellison was able to save and it's a good thing it was recovered! The novel follows a black Southern minister and a white senator who was once very much connected to him. Reverend Hickman arrives in the segregated section of the Senate to listen to Senator Sunraider, who grew up under the name Bliss in Hickman's charge, just in time to hear the bulk of Sunraider's speech which results in the Senator being shot.

That's the most concrete the plot of Juneteenth gets. After that, the novel remains a dialogue and dream-like reminiscence of the past from Sunraider's hospital bed. The story unfolds in a fevered, jazz-heavy way as Sunraider's pain and delusion intertwines with Hickman's sleepiness and we, the reader, are introduced to the past where Hickman and Bliss were like father and son.

The novel is a profound exploration of the human condition and a lyrical success. There are long sections of fluid poetics, sensual details and vibrant dialogue. The plight of both Sunraider/Bliss and Hickman becomes empathetic and the question of who the real victim in the situation is tossed back and forth expertly by Ralph Ellison.

The shame of it all is that the novel bares an incomplete feeling. According to the editor’s notes, Juneteenth was intended to be a part of a larger work, possibly enough for a trilogy. The novel reads that way with gaps of plot and reasoning.

Not for the literary faint-of-heart, this novel requires effort and attention. It's worth it for the simple beauty of language Ellison employs.

8/10

For more books, please check out my index page!

© 2010, 2001 W.L. Swarts. May not be reprinted without permission.

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Invisible Man By Ralph Ellison: The Perfect, Distinctly American, Novel

The Good: Character, Narrative Quality, Sweeping themes, every single word!
The Bad: NONE! Not a one!
The Basics: Invisible Man is a rarity in American literature, a perfect novel!


Every now and then, we run into an impossible goal: throwing a perfect game, singing on the same stage as our musical icons, writing something unparalleled in the history of literature. One of my goals became impossible in 1994, a year before I read Invisible Man and the goal was to meet Ralph Ellison for he has, in Invisible Man, created the perfect novel and to meet such a man and tap his brain would have been incredible.

Invisible Man is the type of novel most people don't pick up unless they're forced to for a college class. It's also a piece that enriches all who do make the effort.

On the plot front, the novel is about a young man's journey from the South to Harlem and the people he meets along the way who challenge him. The unnamed narrator journeys as a black man into white America tossed among forces that seek to control him and keep him in his place. After being expelled from a black school for showing one of the white patrons of the school the slums where some of the lower-class blacks live, the narrator journey's North to find work. Initially thwarted by the anti-recommendations of the university's chancellor, the narrator soon finds work and eventually falls in with a group of radicals who are working together for goals that are essentially Marxist. As the narrator becomes a leader in Harlem's new progressive community, he finds himself the target of the ambitions and machinations of others' politics and he finds himself in a struggle for his life, his freedom and the strength of his ideology.

On the character level, the volume is about the sum of human emotion and experience. That is to say Invisible Man is the grand exploration of what makes us human both individually and as a society. The unnamed narrator of Invisible Man is an outsider through and through who must rise above the limitations imposed upon him by an often racist society that seeks to use him as a tool and exploit him rather than acknowledge his individuality and his rights to freedom and self-determination.

No novel written succeeds so admirably or so poetically in capturing the loss and confusion of being a human in a world bigger than we are better than Invisible Man. Ralph Ellison masterfully creates a world for the reader using poetics and diction more often found in the works of jazz musicians than novelists. He writes in flowing lines that express the loneliness of his protagonist with a wrenching sense of the size of the world relative to the smallness of our hero. From the opening in the protagonist's well-lit pit through the battles the narrator finds himself a part of, the language is tight, precise and immediately evocative of imagery that puts the reader firmly in the time and place of the novel.

To say much more - or even what I've said - is to do the novel an injustice. It is to simplify the grandeur and scope of a simply astounding piece of literature. Go get the book, don't even read the back, open it up and begin in the hole with the narrator. Let it be a pure experience.

There are no drawbacks to this book. Not a one. The easy poke is to say "Oh, the novel fails because the narrator doesn't even have a name!" The truth, however, is that until you try to describe the novel to another, it's easy to read and not even notice that the narrator lacks a name. The reason he does is because he is all of us.

Escape the ordinary for the extraordinary.

10/10

For easy access to all of my book reviews, please check out my index page!

© 2010, 2007, 2001 W.L. Swarts. May not be reprinted without permission.

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