I have never been so glad, and have had so much trouble, to finish a novel. Well, that’s not true. On my old schedule I read maybe three or four books a year and I rarely ever finished them, but seriously I found this book a difficult hump to get over. I wanted to throw it across the room multiple times out of mundane language and boredom. It was not bad, it just felt a little gratuitous and screamed of an author’s first book. If it was not good, then Spoon in the Road was absolute garbage (I know). Invisible Man follows a nameless protagonist through his evolution from Southern schoolboy to New York degenerate. If I was being honest, I would suggest that you read the first five chapters and throw it out after that. I believe the book was initially written in part for a magazine, and the first 100 pages are quite good, but after that, there is supposed symbolism, rambling, and uninspired conflict. Stephen King says that writers have idealized “the novel” and many of us try too hard to write one when it is better to master the craft of short stories, rather than poorly execute a longer narrative. I agree with him (especially in this case), and my current 700-page opus of a sequel, would be much better off if I had the skills to properly write it.
The story follows a man at a southern college who accidentally reveals the ugly underbelly of the school to a white man of importance and is banished from the college to go to New York to find work. He has a knack for speaking and a revolutionary organization shepherds him through leading a movement. He discovers that this organization, The Brotherhood, is callous and he ends up empathizing with a man named Ras the Destroyer who believes that race is of fundamental importance between the alternative movements. It ends with a riot and him disappearing into a hole in the wall.
The transformation from a man filled with yessus to the white man, into an invisible attuned rebellious avant-garde is the redeeming plot in the story. For every 100 pages, there are maybe a few sentences worth of good insight. The rest is action. He said, she said, I did, then this. It is the narrator going from job to the next without much purpose. At times Ralph Ellison makes you want to believe in what the narrator is doing, like it has meaning, but I just don’t buy it. The narrator never holds a job long enough to feel any empathy for what he is doing, how well he is swimming, or why he is there. I believe it isn’t until the 325th page that there is recurrent dialogue from a character earlier in the book. That is another thing, except for the first hundred pages, most of the characters are wooden, forgetful caricatures. I didn’t relate or have any sympathy for any of them (even when they died). I somehow was swept away with the little excursion, but it could have been half as long. Some parts are fun, but the rest are understimulating, occasionally difficult to digest, and overly drawn out. When I read a book, I don’t want my main concern to be when I’m going to finish it. It earns some points for still being contemporary since race rebellion and identity are still very modern issues. It just wasn’t very deep. It is as if I wrote a children’s book about being pro-choice. You might get the point, but it’s a concept that could be explained to a child. It was overcomplicated simple virtues. Not very compelling.
70/100
Ben Bonkoske 