Review: What the Shadow Told Me

What the Shadow Told Me
Kurtis Davidson
Eastern Washington University Press
ISBN 1 59766 002 7

A reductio ad absurdum, in the most literal sense of the phrase, of the life of Ralph Waldo Ellison: Born in 1913 in Oklahoma City, he later joined the Merchant Marine during World War II. Seven years after war's end, he published the book on which his entire professional career and literary reputation would rest, Invisible Man, an achievement made possible largely through the support of Fanny, his long-suffering wife. From then until his death in 1994, Ellison rode that novel's coattails through the halls of academe—first Bard, then Yale, then Rutgers, and finally New York University—and worked on a much-discussed, highly anticipated, never-completed second novel, provisionally titled Juneteenth. As if to justify its continued absence, he claimed (falsely, as time would reveal) that three hundred pages of the manuscript were lost in a house fire in 1967.

Much of this reductio, already known to most readers with a vague recollection of twentieth-century American literature, is the thinly veiled biographical backbone of Kurtis Davidson's What the Shadow Told Me. The novel's protagonist, Rufus Walter Eddison, is born in Missouri in 1916. He fights in the Second World War. He marries Maisy May, a devoted woman who encourages his literary endeavors from the very start. (Eddison is nevertheless kinder to her than Ellison was to Fanny, who had to endure her husband describing his extramarital affairs in punishing detail when catharsis so compelled him.) Through her support, in 1951 he publishes the acclaimed and influential novel Darkness Visible, which brings him fame, wealth, and a cushy professorial post at New York College. His house later burns down, potentially destroying the manuscript to the long-awaited second novel from which Davidson's very real novel takes its name. After Eddison's death, the literary establishment scrambles, as it did with Ellison, to cobble together any collection of pages resembling what the second novel was rumored to be.

The absurdum comes in the form of plot ornaments (that is, loosely related sub-stories about yams, Kwanzaa, Chikki Wikki fast food, the Baby Bomber, The Idaho Jenkins Show, and Black Santa) and the supporting cast of characters. Among this gaggle is, to pick the first name that comes to mind, Biminim Strimpoonanamam, who translates Eddison (as well as Bellow and Grisham, we're told) into pidgin English variants of Hindi, Tamil, Thai, and other languages spoken among cultures with a liberal view toward copyright. Through his translation, Eddison's Darkness Visible becomes Who See Blackie?, a bricolage of abstruse poetry and vulgar nonsense; one of the beloved book's most famous passages—"Good news comes in the morning. Bad news comes at night. But really bad news? That comes anytime at all."—is rendered thus by Strimpoonanamam: "News of the happy comes soon. News of the sad becomes later. But excellent news of the sad? That comes always." These translated excerpts serve as cryptic, mildly amusing epigraphs throughout the novel.

Marching alongside Strimpoonanamam in this farcical cavalcade is Eddison's mysterious acquaintance, Henry David Monroe, who may in fact be the author's alter ego. Like the all-too-cute name he has chosen for him, Davidson also can't help but plant more clues than necessary as to this character's identity. The truth becomes clear to the reader long before it finally dawns on Justina Patterson, a sleuthing literary agent and one of What the Shadow Told Me's less over-the-top characters. This exasperating overplaying of what could have been an effective hand is one of the novel's crucial let-downs.

Following Eddison's passing and the emergence of all his life's unsolved riddles, it's Patterson, Strimpoonanamam, Rwanda Evilsizer (along with her sons, one of whom is the Tourette-afflicted aspiring rapper Funky Franks), the academic phony Dr. Edith Lee-Frasier, NYC president Mason Hartwood, embittered writer Timm Clifton, and a host of others—with the notable absence of Monroe—who are trying to capitalize on What the Shadow Told Me in whatever form it might or might not exist. Imagine It's a Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad World set in a debased republic of letters. Some are doing so out of revenge, some out of greed, some out of sheer opportunism, and some out of loyalty; few, if any of them, however, are especially sympathetic characters, and many only seem to exist for their ostensible comedic value. Had the second not been the case, the first might have corrected itself. But What the Shadow Told Me—the actual novel, that is, not the fictitious one—sets out to cover far too much ground with far too many people, and as a result the story and all its teeming contents are just a bit too ramshackle and superficially sketched to last the ages.

Then again, maybe longevity wasn't Davidson's intent. Since its publication in 2005 (though the book did win the Faulkner Society of New Orleans Award in 2003; presumably this was in some other form), What the Shadow Told Me has already dated. It references the Internet with an awkwardness that seems at once ill at ease with its newfangled terminology and naively optimistic about its permanence. When Justina Patterson comes to investigate possible links between Eddison and Monroe, she "[checks] both Amazon.com and Advanced Book Exchange"; several pages later, she "[gets] online at Google.com." Later still she "place[s] her faith in directions from Mapquest.com." To avoid having the prose read like clumsy, slightly dated dot-com product placement (and does Google really get a user online?), these online forays could have been described in more general and less ephemeral terms.

Name-dropping turns out to be something of a compulsion in What the Shadow Told Me. In Eddison's hallway there's a who's-who (or who was who) gallery of photographs that Patterson can't help but admire for nearly two pages: Eddison with the likes of Twiggy, Susan Dey, Adolph [sic] Hitler, and, in a gag that isn't quite as meta as it would like to be, Ralph Ellison. The roll call of celebrities attending Eddison's funeral, which includes Luke Perry and Queen Latifah, is either a tongue-in-cheek acknowledgement of these stars' fleeting fame or a wholesale failure to recognize it. The prestige Eddison lends to New York College enables the university to lure guest lecturers like "Amy Grant, Alvin Toffler, […] Martha Stewart, William Westmoreland, Bill Cosby, Andrew Wiles, Abigail Van Buren, and on and on." Indeed. The larger question here is, like this gratuitous listing of notables, when the car Patterson briefly rents on her hunt for Monroe is conspicuously identified as a Hyundai Accent, what purpose does it fulfill, exactly? Do these very specific, concrete references lend more credibility to a text that seems to delight in—nay, flaunt—its absurdity, or is that juxtaposition supposed to somehow augment the comedy of the absurd?

These devices—the cheeky fascination with brand and celebrity, the willfully outrageous characters, the rug-pulling narrative stunts, the playful winks and indulgent self-awareness—are the stock in trade of many contemporary bestsellers, and What the Shadow Told Me does not emulate them so much as it merely resembles them. (The template is to some degree the Brooklyn Book of Wonder, discussed here.) To top off this achingly postmodern construction, the novel even includes the requisite press clippings and heartstring-tugging, neo-Dickensian subplot, which, incidentally, doesn't quite dovetail with the main story when things begin to race headlong to a close. And, of course, closure.

Yet it would be wrong to say that What the Shadow Told Me avoids risks altogether. The book throws custard pies in the face of political correctness; much of its humor is boldly and unabashedly racially charged. Strimpoonanamam, who is besotted with American culture and prone to comically formal speech and malapropisms, and the Evilsizer family, obnoxious, poorly educated, out to make a quick buck with as little effort as possible, are not much more than deliberately overblown racial stereotypes with a bit of stuffing. Even Eddison gets the burlesque treatment. His memorial service ends "with the dead man's favorite song, a little-known Negro spiritual, 'There'll Be Biscuits and Gravy Aplenty up Yonder'," a tune Maisy May later sings aloud in a moment of contemplation. Although Davidson, as he did with the Monroe subplot, occasionally underestimates the power of subtlety and restraint, thereby allowing a handful of episodes to cross over into caricature or outright poor taste, most of the time this works. The intentionally self-parodic racial stereotype—for example, the idea that no one can tell that Funky Franks suffers from Tourette Syndrome when he's rapping—is the punchline; by and large, the humor is droll, not mean-spirited.

Were this all part of a story that took any other literary biography as its trellis, its preferred form of humor would fall under a different type of scrutiny. But What the Shadow Told Me is on several levels asking to be read as a counterweight, a response, or a complement to Invisible Man. The cultural identity of blacks in America, to which that important novel helped give shape, is in Davidson's novel being examined from another side, a point in time when, half a century on, the extant racial divides in the United States slowly, finally appear to be crumbling. (In fact, What the Shadow Told Me seems prescient in this respect, given that Davidson isn't likely to have seen Barack Obama's star in its ascendancy back in 2005.) Does this somehow make What the Shadow Told Me the proper successor to Invisible Man, the book that Juneteenth should have been? No, not by a long shot, for all the reasons given above. But it is worth noting that the attitude of Davidson's novel toward race and all its attendant taboos is in marked contrast to the sombre narrative of its forerunner. Within the confines of its fictional universe it even recreates Invisible Man in its own image, twisting Darkness Visible into a convoluted tale of alien abduction with a homosexual protagonist. Whether or not the author's flippancy is warranted will depend on how far you think civil rights in America have come, and how much farther they have left to go.

That might have been an ideal place to close, but it would mean overlooking the second, less overt risk: joint authorship. Kurtis Davidson is the nom de plume of two individuals, academic colleagues Kurt Ayau and David Rachels; their first novel, stitched together from the words of two minds working in tandem, hides its seams well. Although there are times when the hand of one or the other seems to be more in evidence, on the whole What the Shadow Told Me is, at least from a stylistic standpoint, an impressively cohesive work. Despite Ayau's and Rachels' hybrid pen, however, or quite possibly because of it, the lingering impression of What the Shadow Told Me is one of a generally entertaining work with manifold ambitions but none fully met.

• NB: Some biographical info mentioned above stems from Arnold Rampersad's Ralph Ellison: A Biography (2007).