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April 16, 1952
Books of the Times
By ORVILLE PRESCOTT

INVISIBLE MAN
By Ralph Ellison

Ralph Ellison's first novel, "The Invisible Man," is the most impressive work of fiction by an American Negro which I have ever read. Unlike Richard Wright and Willard Motley, who achieve their best effects by overpowering their readers with documentary detail, Mr. Ellison is a finished novelist who uses words with great skill, who writes with poetic intensity and immense narrative drive. "Invisible Man" has many flaws. It is a sensational and feverishly emotional book. It will shock and sicken some of its readers. But, whatever the final verdict on "Invisible Man" may be, it does mark the appearance of a richly talented writer.

Ralph Ellison was born in Oklahoma and educated at Tuskegee Institute. He has shined shoes and played the first trumpet in a jazz orchestra. He has studied music and sculpture, lectured on Negro culture and James Joyce, written short stories and literary criticism. In "Invisible Man" he has written a book about the emotional and intellectual hazards which beset the educated Negro in America. He has written it on two levels. The first is the level of story-telling, the second that of exaggeration, suggestion and symbolism.

"Invisible Man" is much more successful in the first respect, it seems to me, than in the second. Mr. Ellison has a grand flair for gaudy melodrama, for savage comedy, for emphatic characterization. He is not interested in literal, realistic truth, but in an emotional, atmospheric truth which he drives home with violence, writing about grotesquely violent situations. With gruesome power he has given "Invisible Man" the frenzied tension of a nightmare.

This is a story of the adventures, shocks and disillusionments of a young Southern Negro, a naive idealist with a gift for spontaneous oratory, who journeys -- almost like Paul Bunyan's pilgrim -- through Harlem's slough of despond, but who never reaches the other side. It is told in the first person and is divided into a series of major episodes, some lurid and erotic, some ironic and grotesque. The breathless excitement and coldly sardonic humor of many of these are superb.

The nameless narrator learns his first important lesson in disillusionment at a Southern Negro college when he discovers that the president he admired humbly is a cynical hypocrite. He learns more in a surrealistic horror of a paint factory on Long Island; more still during his service in the "Brotherhood."

The "Brotherhood" is Mr. Ellison's euphuistic synonym for the Communist party. Why he does not call the party by its real name is a mystery. But the identification is exact, and his befuddled hero's adventures among the "brothers" area fine demonstration of thought control, party discipline, duplicity and treachery. Mr. Ellison obviously knows what he is talking about, and it is not pleasant. His hero experienced a brief hour of glory as an orator and then a permanent state of humiliation and despair. And the Harlem riot which the "Brotherhood" provoked makes a theatrical climax of looting and arson for Mr. Ellison's book.

"Invisible Man" is undoubtedly melodramatic; but each melodramatic incident represents some aspect of the Negro's plight in America, or of his response to it. To this extent, Mr. Ellison's novel is sharp and clear. But "Invisible Man" is not all melodrama. Parts of it consist of long and impassioned, sometimes hysterical, reveries which are frequently highly obscure. Other parts still seem grotesquely exaggerated or repetitious. And these strange interludes are overwritten in an ultra pretentious, needlessly fancy way. Spasms of torrential rhetoric, they obscure the point of some of Mr. Ellison's symbolic incidents and check temporarily the swift course of his story.

The bewildered and nameless hero of "Invisible Man" longs desperately to achieve a personal success and to help his people. But his role as a man acted upon more often than acting, as a symbol of doubt, perplexity, betrayal and defeat, robs him of the individual identity of the people who play a part in his life. These, while not subtly portrayed, have a vibrant life which makes them seem real and interesting. They include Dr. Bledsoe, the sanctimonious and unscrupulous college president; Mr. Norton, the Boston millionaire benefactor of the college; Lucius Brockway, psychopathic engineer in the paint factory; "Ras, the Exhorter," rabble-rouser and street prophet; Brother Jack, one-eyed and ruthless member of the "Brotherhood" committee.

"Invisible Man" is tough, brutal and sensational. It is uneven in quality. But it blazes with authentic talent. No one interested in books by or about American Negroes should miss it.

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