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"Richard Wright's Last Novel
Wright, Richard. A Father’s Law. New York: HarperPerennial, 2008. 288 pp. $14.95.
The Richard Wright Centennial (2008) provides a special opportunity for readers to reconsider salient aspects of Richard Wright’s life (4 September 1908-28 November 1960) and the many angles from which his fiction and non-fiction can still cast light on fundamental issues of the twenty-first century. The pre-centennial “Reading Richard Wright on the Eve of His 100th Birthday” series (January through December 2007) encouraged residents of Natchez, Mississippi to read and talk about thirteen of Wright’s books. Having chosen Uncle Tom’s Children (1938) as the book all Mississippians should read during 2008, the MISSISSIPPI READS project may succeed in putting to rest the question “Who is Richard Wright?” In the midst of centennial activities, the pièce de résistance will be the publication of Wright’s last novel, A Father’s Law, in January 2008. Written in the final months of his life, this novel invites us to readjust our thinking about Wright’s relentless exploration of the human condition.
Wright’s forte was the creation of stories and cultural meditations that do not permit readers to be complacent, passive, or indifferent. He inspired argument about the values and acts which generate conflict or peace, wretchedness or prosperity. Indeed, in A Father’s Law, Wright provides fresh evidence of his talent for spinning tales which catch our conscience. He demonstrates, in a novel that is slightly more reader-friendly than either The Outsider (1953) or The Long Dream (1958), why the confluence of psychology, philosophy, and criminology is a compelling tactic. It works well in fiction that has affinities, let us say, with Melville’s romances or Dostoevsky’s Crime and Punishment.
Unlike some twentieth-century African American novels that focus on detection and kinship—works by Jeffery Renard Allen, Toni Morrison, and David Bradley come to mind, A Father’s Law dwells less on the specifics of racialized being-in-the-world and more on ancient prejudices, biological anxieties, and legalized mores that frustrate people’s efforts to act morally, to do the right thing. Wright uses some elements of the detective novel to plot crucial moments in the relationship of Chief of Police Rudolph Turner with his son Tommy, but Wright subverts our expectations. We do not have an average thriller. He is not faithful to that genre as was his friend Chester Himes in the Coffin Ed-Grave Digger series. A Father’s Law denies us the pleasure we might derive from the time-killing fictions we consume between flights at the airport or when the thin offerings of television bore us.& It summons us to ponder what conditions necessitate law, how strict construction of law may debase our humanity, and how a father’s guilt and probing may quicken a son’s embrace of real or imagined criminality. It invites us to interrogate the minds of two characters seemingly caught in the net of law.
As a police chief in Brentwood Park, an upscale Chicago suburb, Rudolph (Ruddy) Turner relishes his achievement, and he loves “the laws and rules of the community with an abiding and intense passion.” Nevertheless, as a father who is Republican, Catholic, and black, he is vulnerable. His badge of authority is a weak shield. He has failed to cultivate bonds of friendship with his nineteen year old son Tommy, although he has been responsible in providing him with material goods and educational advantages. He feels guilty about that failure. His efforts to make amends, to know his son better, only beget more doubts. Is his son against him and the bourgeois values for which he stands? Is his son a genius and a criminal? Wright’s masterful depiction of Turner’s states of mind and Tommy’s catalytic antagonism leads us into a vortex where explanations of good, evil, guilt, innocence, obedience and fathomless resentment evade us. His prose at once charms and frightens us with the power of the indeterminate.
For some readers, A Father’s Law may appear to be a rewriting of The Long Dream insofar as it is about fathers and sons. Others, focusing on Tommy’s character, will be reminded of the long song of yearning in The Outsider. The resemblances among the books exist only on the surface of the narratives or in our anxiousness to reinvent Wright’s discourses on law and masculinity fifty years after publication of The Long Dream. The dice are loaded differently in Wright’s last novel. As we descend into the depths of A Father’s Law, we discover that Wright’s exploration is superbly radical, pre-future rather than modern.
In The Long Dream, the son, Rex “Fishbelly” Tucker, comes to despise his middle-class father’s corruption and sycophancy; he scorns Tyree Tucker’s wearing of a mask in the face of racism and the “white” law’s turning a blind eye, if sufficiently bribed, on matters of black criminality. Under his father’s tutelage, Rex becomes savvy about the hypocrisies of a segregated world; out of spite, he eschews formal education, embraces “manhood,” and becomes his father’s partner in shady dealings. The narrative is a faithful rendering of law and desire in the postwar South. On the other hand, A Father’s Law is set in the “integrated” North. Tommy has stronger intellectual yearnings than Rex, and his life is more sheltered. His father has never instructed him about the ways of the real world. It is through his readings in psychology and sociology that he develops distrust of his father’s unquestioning belief in the rightness of law. He is poised intellectually ,much like Dostoevsky’s Raskolnikov, to challenge the foundations of a belief grounded in the dimness of the state of nature and some ur-social contract. He is ill-equipped to deal with some brutal facts of everyday life.
While father and son are at odds about the nature of the criminal mind and obedience to man’s law, they are of one accord in regarding congenital syphilis as an unmistakable sign of moral pollution. Tommy reluctantly confesses to his father that he broke off his engagement to his girlfriend Marie when blood tests showed she inherited syphilis. Transferring his dread of the unclean to the urban environment, Tommy consequently abandoned his sociological studies of Chicago’s Black Belt. Turner is naturally concerned about his son’s emotional state, but he is relieved that right and just law prevented his son from marrying “a tainted girl” who has inherited the sins of her forefathers. Such sharply gendered irony! There is even more irony in Turner’s assuming Tommy’s unbalanced view of life can be cured by exposing him to the state of affairs in Brentwood Park, so he might see “that all areas had their tragedies, that all areas had their poisons, their sources of contamination.” Tommy knows more about Brentwood than his father.
Under the influence of patriarchal law and prejudices, father and son reify the blindness implicit in how some American males socially construct reality. Wright’s characterization of males tests the capability of psychological realism to explain. If we accept that in his last days Wright was more openly sharing the obligation of reaching ethical conclusions with his potential readers, we better appreciate the new turn in his expeiments with the art of fiction. The novel is a question-making instrument. The reader must supply answers, remaining uncertain that they are the right ones. Our transactions with the text provoke us to consider that law qua law does not secure order; on the contrary, it may induce chaos.
Given that A Father’s Law is replete with echoes from such earlier novels as Lawd Today! ,Native Son , The Outsider, and Savage Holiday , the novel is a summation of Wright’s aesthetic, his hardboiled vision of a future for which the Cold War was preparing us and the worlds we inhabit. We may find ourselves agreeing with an insight Julia Wright gives us in her introduction. “There is eeriness in my father’s premonition,” she writes, “that criminality was doomed to bloom among the elite, that the energies of the Tommies of America might better be used by a cause or a movement for justice, that syphilis would overtake us under another name, and that youth serial killing on American university campuses would eventually inspire a prize-winning film in Cannes”(xi-xii).
Yes, Wright was already prophetic in Native Son. If external events lend credibility to prophecy, we must not neglect the Old Testament sources of Wright’s premonition and vision and Wright’s struggle to find the language and forms which speak of the terror and impediments embedded in the law of the father. What is law? Who is its father? What are we to make of Nietzsche’s notion that morality is a disease? Does the enlightenment promised by ratiocination in the modern world only intensify the power of what Sir Francis Bacon identified as the “Four Idols”? Even in its unfinished state, A Father’s Law succeeds in reading mankind’s dirty laundry and in leaving us with the option of reading against the patriarchal grain.
Jerry W. Ward, Jr.
November 22, 2007