Tangled

JUST months before his death in Paris in late 1960, Richard Wright was still wrestling with the same demons: class, politics, religion and racism. His last reflections -- 360 pages found in a binder -- make up “A Father’s Law,” a previously unpublished novel now out to mark the centennial of the author’s birth.

Assembled by Wright’s daughter Julia, the book is being marketed as a “final literary gift” from an author who wrote a series of groundbreaking works -- “Native Son” and “Black Boy” among them. “A Father’s Law,” though, is an uneven cap to an eloquent if controversial career.

Wright was long committed to portraying black America in all its variegated complexity, and “A Father’s Law” is in many ways an extension of that endeavor. But it’s bent into a whodunit of sorts with heavy doses of sociological theory. The novel was to be Wright’s attempt at a “psychological thriller,” Julia Wright explains in her introduction, but it’s rough going, marked by stilted dialogue, high-pitched melodrama and a windy, convoluted narrative. It feels very much like a work-in-progress, something still circling around to find itself.

What does a document like this -- in all its unevenness and disarray -- tell us about Wright? Does it add to, or detract from, his legacy?

The story’s bare bones speak volumes: Rudolph “Ruddy” Turner, the father of the title, is a status-quo sort: A black man, politically conservative, he is about to retire from the Chicago police department and has a nice home in the suburbs, a doting wife and a son, Tommy, in college. But a growing fissure separates him from Tommy, who with each passing day seems more like a stranger -- so much so that Ruddy begins regarding him with suspicion, as a criminal.

Instead of retirement, Ruddy is offered a plum job, of which he says he is “not w-worthy” -- chief of police of a white suburb facing a gruesome murder wave. The tension between father and son, however -- generational, educational, philosophical -- is what gives the book its heft and hints at what Wright must have been trying for. Are Tommy and Ruddy metaphors for the shifting mindscape of black Americans? How have decades of segregation, racism and lack of access marked families? What are the aftereffects?

For critics who felt Wright distanced himself from the pertinent issues of black America when he expatriated to Europe, this book suggests it wasn’t that simple. Wright attempted to travel deep inside the fraught territory of the African American mind -- shocked by racism, consumed by guilt, blemished by anger. What might Ruddy have passed down to his son? It takes courage to face that legacy, and even more to have it stare back at you from the page. *

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lynell.george@latimes.com