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Kristen's Reviews > Black Boy
Black Boy
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I felt something shift in me as a reader as I neared the end of Wright鈥檚 autobiography. Where he began relating his experiences of, and delineating his theoretical disagreements with, the Communist party in Chicago, my experience of reading became less interactive, less organic, and to some degree, less interesting. I think I stopped making personal connections to the material. I was no longer reading to discover what feelings, ideas, or insights his story would incite in me. Instead, I began engaging with his words on an intellectual level, processing the points of his argument and accepting some and rejecting others. It occurred to me, that at this point in the book, his style changed, and this observation allowed me to ponder again something that Phillip had said about my first workshop submission鈥攖hat my writing in that piece tended more to the sociological than to the literary. One of the ways I鈥檝e come to understand that comment is through Virginia Woolf鈥檚 observation in A Room of One鈥檚 Own that 鈥渨hen a book lacks suggestive power, however hard it hits the surface of the mind it cannot penetrate within.鈥� Some books simply educate, while others enlighten by allowing the reader鈥檚 experience to mix with those on the page. Or, some, like Wright鈥檚, begin in a brilliant literary vein but veer off when the writer becomes too didactic.
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Reading Progress
February 28, 2008
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March 15, 2008
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Kristen
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rated it 4 stars
Mar 15, 2008 08:16AM
Wright on writing: "My purpose was to capture a physical state or movement that carried a strong subjective impression, an accomplishment which seemed supremely worth struggling for. If I could fasten the mind of the reader upon words so firmly that he would forget words and be conscious only of his response, I felt I would be in sight of knowing how to write narrative. I strove to master words, to make them disappear, to make them important by making them new, to make them melt into a rising spiral of emotional stimuli, each greater than the other, each feeding and reinforcing the other, and all ending in an emotional climax that would drench the reader with a sense of a new world. That was the single aim of my world."
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I completely agree with you because I also stopped making connections of my life to his when he started talking more serious as he became an adult. I guess I feel that way because I haven't reached that age yet
black Boy did feel like two novels. I appreciated why Book of the Month Club would chose to publish Part One exclusively. However, I found the political aspects of Wright's life fascinating. He would continue to his death to found and to belong to organizations dedicated to the elevation of humanity, justice, and the arts and yet each would let him down.
Perhaps you've never lived in or at the mercy of a Communist-tinged community. I actually found this portion of the book to be uncannily relatable, and besides, who says it had to be relatable? He wasn't being didactic; he was giving a long defense, his case, pretty organic considering the events of his life at that point. The book is about his experience. That's what an autobiography is, after all. I'm not sure about this standard by which you've rated the book, that an author has some obligation to seem relatable when he's describing his own life. He found a cause, tried to serve it, and was persecuted by his "comrades". Pretty fascinating in my opinion.On its own this portion of the book went down in my favorites. Additionally I feel you may have taken for granted his writing style; to me it always seemed characterized by an eagerness to communicate through some vein of common intuition. Since he's a writer, ultimately, I think this should rank among one of the top considerations when critiquing the book, and I didn't notice him falter in this regard.
I get that many people, even (if not especially --oddly enough) avid readers, become uncomfortable when politics is introduced, as if it's something separate from the human experience, but to knock Wright for covering in his own autobiography a phase of his life that was directly associated with and dictated by party politics is just silly.
I was riveted for the first two-thirds of the book, as well, but kind of lost connection near the end as well.
