What the Shadow Told Me by Kurtis Davidson

This is a strange book. It is satirical about writers, book publishers, Asian-Americans who learned English from reading, English professors and college presidents, rappers, protesters, and every other character in the novel, however minor. It is a take-off on the life of Ralph Ellison, who wrote the acclaimed Invisible Man in 1952 and never delivered another novel, until 2,000 pages of writing were discovered after his death almost fifty years later and edited into the novel Juneteenth. Sadly enough, I would not have realized this at all, but for a comment by a reader on Amazon.com, where I ordered the book. This novel was actually written by two white college professors, who used Kurtis Davison as a pen-name, is mainly about black people, and is not politically correct at all. And it is very funny.

Invisible Man, as I remember it, was about how nobody saw the narrator for who he really was, but viewed him as a certain "type"; in other words, as a stereotype. And all the characters here are portrayed as stereotypes: the book publisher interested only in the money, not the literature; the college president interested only in the financial bottom-line, not the scholarship; the professor interested only in self-promotion, not intellectual integrity; and so on.

This is something of a detective story--did the writer Rufus Walter Eddison leave a manuscript of new work when he died? where is the manuscript? is the writer Henry David Monroe actually Eddison's altar-ego? did Eddison father children with women other than his wife?

I imagine the authors must have had great fun writing this book, adding characters along the way just so they could be lampooned, trading jokes, thinking of new ways to tie the Eddison story to the Ellison story. It's very clever, with many one-liners. For example, there's this bit about the English professor: "Here she goes, Malcolm thought, launching into Litspeak, the kind of talk that makes you not want to watch PBS." And then there are the stilted and much-too-literal translations of Eddison's first book to pidgin-English by Biminim Strimpoonanamam, which head most chapters. It's really humorous to make fun of the ridiculous mistakes of foreigners when they try to speak English, right?

The novel is amusing on first read, but my final verdict is that it is too self-consciously clever to be worth a second read. After all, when you've already heard the joke, it's not as funny anymore.