Is there any disappointment greater than the disappointment of reading a famous book and finding it lacking?

I recently finish Richard Wright’s Native Son. As it is always mentioned as an important book within the African American literary canon, I had high expectations.

Instead, I found a very dull issue novel. Its dullness arises not from the writing or the plot, but from the worldview.

Perhaps the first third of the novel gives a compelling psychological depiction of the protagonist, Bigger Thomas. Bigger is not a self-aware character, but the representation of adolescent agression arising out of inarticulate frustration rings true.

But events overtake Bigger, and his personality vanishes entirely in the last two thirds of the book. The dominating figure of the saintly communist lawyer is not a clearer indication of the author’s political tendencies, than the loss of Bigger as a character with any internal struggle, for the entirety of the last two thirds of the book. Wright obviously doesn’t regard the individual as a subject worthy of comparison to the larger social forces at work.

Note well: Bigger’s individuality isn’t dissolved by the crimes he commits, but by the narrator’s complete lack of interest in his individuality. Even if Bigger was driven to murder through ineluctable social forces, does that mean that he has no internal reflections on his experiences? Does murder really carry no psychological consequence beyond a feeling of elation at having fought back?

So this work functions as a sort of negative of Crime and Punishment, which begins with a crime and develops the personality from there. (I am probably retreading other people’s arguments with this observation; there’s a reason Dostoyevsky is considered to be prophetic.)

Nor can one really pardon the holes in the plot. (Spoilers coming.) Bigger kills Bessie because she knows he killed Mary. But everyone already knows that Bigger killed Mary, because he ran away when a roomful of reporters discovered Mary’s remains. So what difference does it make whether Bessie lives or dies? Moreover, Bigger attacks Bessie by beating her head with a brick and then throwing her from the fourth floor, while she is unconscious, down an airshaft. Yet later we are told that Bessie did not succumb to these wounds, but instead got up and tried to escape from the airshaft before freezing to death. In what world is this possible?

So I’ll stick to Crime and Punishment.