Navigating the Fiction of Ernest J. Gaines: A Roadmap for Readers by Keith Clark (review)

Keith Clark has written an excellent study of a writer that Americans need to be reading now. This beautifully written book could not be more timely; like Gaines’s fiction, however, it is not bound entirely by the moment in which it appears. Students, teachers, and fellow scholars will be using this text for years to come as they plumb the depths of Gaines’s often underappreciated corpus, gleaning from it lessons about who Americans have been and who we are becoming as we struggle with the entirely vexed and vexing questions of systemic racism and Black freedom. Gaines’s enduring national reputation rests primarily on the publication of two novels, The Autobiography of Miss Jane Pittman (1971) and A Lesson Before Dying (1993). Strikingly, both proved prescient in bringing what would become trending issues before the public. Although scholars and activists were noting the problems associated with mass incarceration before Gaines’s novel appeared, A Lesson Before Dying shone a beautiful and horrifying light on these issues that spread awareness throughout a broader readership. In the wake of Michelle Alexander’s The New Jim Crow, Lesson has become even more prominent and powerful as a commentary on our broken criminal injustice system. Pairing it with selections from Alexander and Colson Whitehead’s The Nickel Boys (2019), I have seen how Gaines’s novel shakes contemporary students to their cores. With Clark’s book, I and other teachers of the novel will have a beautiful explication of the text and a meticulous description of Gaines’s research process in hand to elevate those discussions to even greater heights. Miss Jane Pittman appeared five years before Alex Haley published Roots; the landmark adaptation of Gaines’s novel, starring Cicely Tyson, appeared on CBS in 1974, three years before Roots came to television. Clark emphasizes the “pioneering achievement” of Gaines’s “dramatization of slavery,” noting the author’s role in preparing the way for writers like Toni Morrison and Colson Whitehead (99). He subsequently weaves this topic, Gaines’s exploration of the impact of enslavement on “the peasants” whom his novels and stories commemorate and celebrate, through his assessment of Gaines’s corpus, from Gaines’s first published novel, Catherine Carmier (1964), to his last novella, The Tragedy of Brady Sims (2017). Illuminating Gaines’s overt and more subtle work to “retrieve and re-examine our still-to-be unraveled dark racial past,” Clark ably demonstrates why readers should look beyond the author’s two best-known novels and what they can gain from a sustained exploration of his fiction. Gaines’s treatment of the history of enslavement and oppression is but one of the recurrent motifs Clark explores. Weaving together significant threads of discourse and contestation that have beset critics for the past several decades, Clark repeatedly demonstrates Gaines’s centrality to both the creation and study of twentieth-century Black literature. Citing Alice Walker’s praise of him as “perhaps