Three Days Before the Shooting . . . [Paperback]

I'm about half way through this wonderful collection. This is a very frustrating book because you can see how close Ellson got to finishing what would have been his masterpiece. It reminds me of All the Kings Men, it's that good. It's snowing outside. No school. Coffee. An unfinished epic. Life is good.

Ralph Ellison, it turns out, lived the plot of a mid-'60s novel: a little known author and musician, he published his first book at the age of 39. "Invisible Man" was both critically acclaimed and a bestseller. Ellison won the National Book Award, the first black writer to be awarded the most prestigious award in American literature. Now world-famous, Ellison announced in interviews that he had already begun work on his follow-up novel. For the next four decades he labored on that second novel - but he died in 1994 at the age of 80, and the literary waiting game ended too: His anxiously awaited second work of fiction would never be finished, never be published.

Yet now we have "Three Days Before the Shooting," a massive volume that compiles all the lengthy interlocking segments of the manuscript, along with other fragmentary alternate versions of the story. Editors John F. Callahan and Adam Bradley have performed a labor of love, devotion and mind-numbing scholarship: They have combed through Ellison's countless handwritten papers and computer discs to knit together a coherent, cohesive and lumberingly powerful book by one of the United States' preeminent writers.

The story involves the assassination of a race-baiting U.S. senator with a peculiar past. As a "little boy of indefinite race," Senator Sunraider was raised in rural Georgia by Alonzo Hickman, a one-time jazz player turned preacher. Well, that's the basic set-up of the story, anyway. What we actually have is a turning, twisting narrative that can't stop itself from spiraling outward to other characters, other voices, till the story begins to evoke a tapestry of 20th century American passions and madness -- a vast cloth with holes in the weaving whose ragged thread ends were never tied off.

Usually we speak of the architecture of a novel. With "Three Days Before the Shooting... ," it is possible to talk of its archeology: the '50s, with its basic plot outline and its references to "Negroes" and "that white Cadillac convertible;" the '60s, when Ellison grew less sure of his world and more defiant toward it; the '70s and '80s, when the novel's setting, now historical, became once again easier to delineate.

Listen to a few short horn bursts:

"`So she started trying to dance and, gen'lmens, it was like what they call a 'ca'astrofee.' Juiced as she was and with all those goldbacks hanging around her belly, she was like somebody made out of soft rubber and no bones."

"He lay on his back, looking up through the turbulent space to where the bullet-smashed chandelier, swinging gently under the impact of its shattering, created a watery distortion

Those who have read IVM have hungered forever for more Ellison. The problem was that he never finished his second novel. This fact (and its length) dissuaded me from even thinking about reading "Three Days." Let me assure you that it is a must read, if for nothing else than for "Bliss's Birth," one of the most moving sections of literature that I have every read. While the novel is, in fact, "incomplete," much of its incompleteness concerns the order of episodes and their transitions. The story is complete enough for even a careless reader to get a fantastic understanding of what was intended. I initially was persuaded to try this read by reading Adam Bradley's "Ellison in Progress" also another amazing read. This, coupled with "Juneteenth" and its hints from the Ellison archives were enough to convince me to give it a try. I was not disappointed. The fact that it is not finished and polished and the fact that some scenes are given in different drafts does not encumber the volume, and one must read the entire volume; it's definitely worth it.
I think that the reader, familiar with Ellison, will find a different tone in this book. This is more serious, a little less of the not-quite-surrealistic Ellison that sometimes is present in IVM. While some of the scenes are indeed raucous and outright hysterical, one, nevertheless, sees a perhaps more serious intent in the whole.
While the length is initially intimidating, the volume is excellently bound. As it emerges episodically, but not picaresquely, the story is so fascinating as to make the volume difficult to put aside, even for sleep.

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