Book Review: Lawd Today - Richard Wright

The posthumous work is a relatively new phenomenon for African American literature, and not without its share of high-profile successes. Leon Forrest's Meteor in the Madhouse was polished with editor John Calwetti's almost symbiotic understanding of the author's mad yet beautiful style (think Dostoevsky and Faulkner gone to church), and the resulting set of novellas serve as a fine closure to the career of what many people consider the patron saint of overlooked African American writers.

While Toni Cade Bambara's These Bones Are Not Of My Child suffers from the opaqueness of plot and structure that most unfinished works have, the judicious and careful editing of Toni Morrison, Bambara's longtime mentor, gave it a range of intelligence and lucidity that makes it stand with her best work. Even Ralph Ellison's Juneteenth, a 2,500-page, forty-year-long epic work reduced to a 350-page vanity project by Ellison executor John Callahan, has enough majestic passages to remind the reader of Ellison's position as one of the greatest writers in the history of American literature.

Which makes Richard Wright's Lawd Today all the more disturbing. Given the massive stature of its author, the circumstances regarding its publication and the miserable failure of the work itself, Lawd Today is one of the most depressing reads I've had in a long time. The plot, a day in the life of Jake Jackson, a disgruntled postal worker who bickers with his wife, runs debts with his job and is oppressed by society, is nearly formless, incoherently rendered and crassly told. The result is nothing short of garbage, and by far the worst work that Wright has ever done.

But what bothered me so much was that I didn't know whom to blame for the content, Ellen Wright for publishing it two years after he died, or the author himself. The problem with the posthumous novel is that it takes away an author's ability to guide their own story, the unique creative autonomy that fiction writers have.

When I read it the first time I chalked its failure to the Wright estate's literary grave-digging, given Wright's overall ability to construct the events of a story and the sharp naturalism of his prose. But when I read it again, I saw that it had all of the markings that made his final two works, 1959's The Long Dream. and 1961's Eight Men, such brutal failures: vicious sexism, obsession with violence, atrocious craftsmanship, and subconscious yet deep self-hatred. Adding on the fact that I have found out that Wright had stated numerous times that it was a finished work, this crystallizes its stature as one of the most epic failures in the history of African American literature.

Article Author: Robert Lashley

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