Juneteenth has been announced as one of the most eagerly-awaited US novels of the 20th century. The story is almost a novel in itself. In 1952 a young black author, Ralph Ellison, wrote Invisible Man. The book was a sensation and it rightly became part of the American canon. He announced that he was at work on a second novel. Parts of it appeared in literary magazines; some of it was destroyed in a fire; rumour piled upon rumour; and then, 42 years later, the author died without ever having finished the book.
A literary executor was announced - John Callahan who, along with Ellison's wife, ploughed through hundreds of thousands of words (notes, typescripts, napkins, computer files). No instructions had been left to guide them. They sifted, juggled and welded until it was felt that Ellison's original intention had been saluted. The result, Juneteenth, is muddled and masterful.
The story is, on the surface, simple enough. A black jazzman-turned-Baptist minister (Alfonzo Hickman) happens upon a young boy and is forced to raise him in the American south of the early 1900s. The boy (named Bliss) is white-skinned. They spread the word of God at revivals - and the word is as much jazz as it is gospel. Together, they are pure theatre - the boy "resurrects" himself from a coffin every night, while the black congregations swoon, sing and chant.
The boy, however, has a crisis of identity. He eventually runs away from his black "daddy". He becomes a con artist, using film - yet another American religion - to capture people's souls. He denies his past and eventually (by the 1950s) becomes a U.S. senator in a northern state. He becomes blatantly racist and denounces blacks from the hallowed floors of Washington. For his sins, he is shot, and the novel takes place (through flashback) in the hospital where he lies, attended now by the old preacher whom he ran away from decades before.
Ellison is fiercely ambiguous and provocative when it comes to the issue of race. The boy's ancestry is unclear - he looks white, but he may have black blood. In later years he may or may not be shot by his son, and his son may or may not be half-black. (Ellison has stated in his non-fiction that all Americans are somehow part-black, even if only influenced by the history and consciousness of blacks.)
The novel tends to crescendo when it confronts this mystery of race, and then, at crucial moments, eases itself back down into an intentional ambiguity. If the novel swirls around race, then its style finds eddies in the integration of styles - there are songs, sermons, jazz riffs, dozens (ritualised games in which players out-do each other with insults), folk tales, bawdy jokes, hallucinogenic forays, large chunks of stream-of-consciousness that slip in and out of simple narrative.
The intention is no less than that of Joyce or Faulkner: to create a mythic saga of identity and language. The myth is a loose re-working of Daedalus and Icarus - the young white boy denies his black heritage, re-names himself "Sunraider", and later burns out at the supposed source of contemporary power, politics.
HOWEVER, the architecture of Juneteenth is, at best, precarious. The fact that this 350-page novel has been grafted together gives it great potential to totter, if not simply collapse. In many places it seems that the editorial decisions are faulty. A speech given by the senator at the front of the book is obviously edited - a racist diatribe is incongruously dropped into a passage in praise of diversity. Chapter breaks often break the narrative intensity. Certain scenes seem puttied together, and it is this loose cement which is frustrating.
Juneteenth is an anti-phonal book - it is all about call and response. At its essence, it reads like an African-American church ceremony, unrehearsed, chaotic, human and uplifting. This is not a novel to be read for its immediate pleasure. Instead, it is to be read in order to find the sum pleasure of its disparate parts. It may act like a coin which has slipped down through the lining of your coat - surprising you and delighting you in years to come. As in the epigraph from T.S. Eliot ("This is the use of memory:/ For liberation"), memory should prove liberating to this rich, important and powerful work.
Colum McCann's forthcoming collection, Everything in This Country Must, will be published by Phoenix House in spring, 2000