The Long Dream [Paperback]

"Native Son" was great, barring the party-line that marred the last third. "Black Boy" haunts. His existential stuff is first-rate. But.... But here is Mr. Wright's best. We find here the story of poor Fishbelly, whose father holds the highest position possible for the Mississippi oppressed at the time: undertaker. The events that overtake him strike the reader across the face as rudely as those in previous novels; the civilized are outraged. Read this in the name of liberty.

Wow! What a book. The book was written so percisely that I felt that I was reading a true story. I felt that the characters were real people facing racism in the south during the 1940's. I read his first novel Native Son and loved it! I just happened across this book (The Long Dream) and decided to try it out. I'm so glad I did. Although this was a book of fiction, it was written in such a way that it made you believe that it was a true story. Fishbelly, the main character dealt with the inner struggle of hatred toward white people and people of his own race. He watched how his father bent his knees, dropped his shoulders and shuffle his feet when talking to white people. Fishbelly felt his father was coward for acting that way in front of whites, therefore, hating his father for acting so cowardly, and hating white people for having that kind of power over black people. His father tells him that "A black man's a dream, son, a dream that can't come true." Only later when Fishbelly was falsely accused of raping a white woman did he realize why his father behaved the way he did. The plot thickens at the turning of each page. This book is well worth taking the time to read, you won't regret it.

Any thoughtful German born in the 20th Century and still able to read today needs to dwell with the atrocities of the Third Reich in mind. No, I don't suggest that every German does or should meditate incessantly on guilt and horror; the books are there to remind him/her. Mann, Grass, Döblin, Fallada, Roth, Keun, Koeppen, Lenz, Sebald, Mueller, Erpenbeck ... can you name a single important German writer of the last two or three generations who hasn't written about the Holocaust?

America and American novelists, it's somewhat shameful to note, have shrugged off the horrors of their history more casually. Yes, of course, there have been profound American novels about World War 2, and about "being Jewish" in America, and about the "Southern Consciousness". But, for better or worse, American writers have been able to escape preoccupation with the "sins of their fathers" and brothers. Slavery, that unconscionable disgrace to the Land of the Free, has become as remote as romance, though currently there's a plague of apologists for slavery and secession along with rabid denouncers of Abraham Lincoln as a tyrant and 'statist'.

But what about Jim Crow? Segregation/apartheid? The hundred years of ugly, hateful, violent racism from 1865 to 1965 (and beyond)? Get ready, some of you in amazonia, to froth and howl, because I do think the Long Nightmare of lynch-law segregation in America can be compared to the Nazi death camps, and I am disturbed that so many Americans have no consciousness of their nation's shame.

Richard Wright's last published novel "The Long Dream" (1958) is the most horrifying depiction of Jim Crow racism I've ever read. Most of Wright's fiction, including his best-known novel Native Son, is set in the urban North and expresses, sometimes too didactically, the author's political convictions. The Long Dream is set in small-town Mississippi, closer therefore to Wright's autobiographical books, "Black Boy" and "Uncle Tom's Children". Richard Wright could no more help loading his narrative with philosophy than Tolstoy or Zola; he explicates and ruminates sociologically where other writers might artfully leave their 'message' tacit. Nonetheless, this is a powerful, painful, compelling novel, far too good to be as little read as it is.

There are two agonistic themes in The Long Dream, the universal theme of father/son conflict and the historically specific theme of a young black man's conflict with a white society that viciously intends to crush his development. The boy Rex, nicknamed 'Fish', is entrapped (as all sons are) in the life of his father, Tyree, a mortician/brothel-keeper who thrives through toadying to the corrupt powers-that-be of the racist white world. Tyree's ego is strong enough to give him the illusion that he knows "how to handle white folk", a knowledge he hopes to jam into his son's head at any cost. It's obvious to the reader from the start that Tyree is doomed, and the suspense is whether Fish will find another modus vivendi -- a different accommodation, a triumphant rebellion, an escape -- or be degraded and destroyed by the same malevolent white tyranny.

Critics and readers-at-large in 1958, when The Long Dream appeared, found the violence portrayed in the novel distressing. Several prominent critics asserted that Wright was exaggerating the virulence of white racism in the South. Such extremism, they said, was a thing of the past, and perhaps 'sleeping dogs' might best be left lying in the shade. The novel, among other horrors, describes the ghastly fate of a young black man who is dragged to death behind a car. Incredible? I hope you've been reading the newspapers this week, in September 2011! Perhaps Northerners, both white and black, might have imagined that Wright was 'out of touch', living in France, with the progress in race relations in America after World War 2. They were deluded, as the ferocious white back-lash against the Civil Rights movement of the next decade soon proved. Wright was if anything a moderate prophet. There is no exaggeration in this book; every vile deed and every loathsome thought was a daily reality for black Americans under Jim Crow oppression.

"Fish" is not a simple character, a good little boy whom we can empathize with. "Fish" has as much nastiness in him as any tattooed gang-banger you'd be afraid to cross in a dark parking lot today. But Fish also has a spark of intelligence and aspiration, and you as a reader will NEED to know what becomes of him. Tyree Tucker, the father, is no simple figure either; both his goodness and his corruption are compellingly real in Richard Wright's portrayal of him. The greatness of this novel, I'd say, is in the rich realization of its principal characters. There are more comfortable novels of black America -- more pastoral, more benign, more loving in their depiction of the strengths of African-American culture -- but there are few if any novels more brutally true.

› Go to Amazon.com to see all 7 reviews  4.9 out of 5 stars