E-Verse Top 100 Cool Novels #84: Native Son by Richard Wright

by Ernie on 18/04/08 at 9:07 am

Number 84 on our top 100 countdown: Native Son, Richard Wright, 1940. A gripping, scathing, infuriating novel. Arnold Rampersad described Bigger Thomas, the sullen young murderer at the center of the novel, as the least likable main character in all of American literature, which is saying something. Wright’s novel was selected as the Book-of-the-Month and sold hundreds of thousands of copies in its first month, before readers realized that it was not a crime thriller but a provocative analysis of race and violence. The novel is flawed, and Wright himself may have known it. The prolonged court-room scenes at the novel’s end serve largely to counterpoint opposing political forces, the Marxist liberal lawyer, who claims that Bigger Thomas’s crimes extend naturally from an unjust society and the reactionary lawyer, who claims that Thomas’s crimes cannot be justified by any social conditions, however dire, and must be punished to the fullest extent of the law, which is the death penalty. Native Son was overshadowed for many years by Ralph Ellison’s more literary novel Invisible Man, which was justifiably seen as the superior novel, synthesizing modernism and naturalism. In the 1960s, the radicalism that spread across the country threw new light on the extreme themes of Wright’s novel and brought it back into the mainstream. It now seems to be required reading for angry young men and women alike.