Three Days Before the Shooting by Ralph Ellison

(Modern Library, 1,136 pages, $50)

Now we can see for ourselves why the greatest American writer to emerge since World War II published only one novel in his lifetime, said Stanley Crouch in TheDailyBeast.com. Three Days Before the Shooting is the full, unfinished text of Ralph Ellison’s would-be follow-up to Invisible Man, the 1952 debut that launched him into a class with Hemingway. Ellison futilely labored on this work for more than 40 years. But he was “much too conscious of what he wanted his novel to do and achieve.” He yearned to create a work that would place him in a tier occupied only by Melville and Faulkner. Though his “grasp of human nature” didn’t fail him, his technique “could and did.”

Invisible Man ranks as “the seminal piece of fiction about African-American life in the 20th century,” but Ellison’s second book was designed to capture America as a whole, said Malcolm Jones in Newsweek. A race-baiting white politician is shot dead from the balcony of the U.S. Senate chamber. A black musician-turned-preacher is arrested. Yet the relationship between victim and suspect is not what it first appears. A 400-page extract of this book was posthumously published 11 years ago as Juneteenth. But Juneteenth sold Ellison’s effort short: “He was building a cathedral,” and what editors gave us was “a wing of the building.” This longer, messier book has to be categorized as a failed attempt at the Great American Novel, but … wow—“Ellison was so close.”

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The messy nature of this novel was actually intentional, said Nina Sankovitch in HuffingtonPost.com. The structure was meant to celebrate one particular legacy of slavery that Ellison saw in black American culture—the art of talking about a subject by talking around a subject. Despite its complexity, and its incompleteness, Three Days Before the Shooting remains “magnificent for its plot and characters”—and especially for its beautiful prose. Frequently, it “reads like music, a baroque rendition of the blues.”