Roman Clodia's Reviews > Native Son

What a brave and confrontational book this is! Wright could have gone down the easy route of making Bigger Thomas a falsely accused man and generated sympathy by showing him as the victim of a racialised legal system, but he doesn't - instead he gives us a far more complex portrait of Blackness, masculinity and class, all of which collide in Bigger.

Wright's introduction makes the point that Bigger is a composite of men he has known - white as well as black - ill-educated, dispossessed, alienated, angry, violent at times and also scared and hurting at the alien world through which they're trying to navigate. In so many ways, this feels like a contemporary novel so it's both shocking and disheartening that it was written in 1940 - some things have changed, so much hasn't.

Bigger is subject to US segregation laws which stop him learning to fly a plane, for example, something which he yearns to do and, given how well he drives, might have given him the skills and pride he is sorely lacking. He is subject to the patronising interest of a philanthropic white family whose own privilege and 'white saviour' complex stops them seeing how uncomfortable they make Bigger with their probing questions and their charity and their desire to be seen eating with him in a Black neighbourhood diner.

Wright's own Communist beliefs shine through, with the foundational analysis of class that underpins the socialised depiction of race - Bigger could almost have been a white working-class young man caught up in a system that devalues and degrades.

There are places where this has the feel of a noir thriller, at others the prose trips over itself in something that gets close to, but is not, stream of consciousness. This isn't a book for readers who need to like a character in order to rate a book, but for the rest of us, this is angry, smart, despairing, raw and ultimately haunting as we contemplate the fate of the Bigger Thomases of our own world.