With his groundbreaking, acclaimed works [book:Deserted Cities of the Heart] (1988), [book:Slam] (1990), and the World Fantasy Award-winning novel [book:Glimpses] (1993), Lewis Shiner exploded from the late-1980s Austin literary scene. As happens far too often with celebrated wordsmiths, he disappeared into the literary ocean. Except for the occasional short work and his 1999 novel, [book:Say Goodbye], Shiner has toiled in relative obscurity.

In his triumphant return to novel-length fiction, Shiner – now residing in North Carolina – emerges from his literary cocoon to craft Black & White, a powerful exploration of institutional racism and family identity. Centering his tale on the disturbingly real history of the doomed Durham, N.C., African-American community Hayti, Shiner ushers his protagonist, comic-book artist Michael Cooper, into the maelstrom of his father's past, full of terrible secrets, voodoo, and even murder. As the compelling narrative unfolds, Cooper – accompanying his mother and father, Ruth and Robert, from Dallas to his birthplace of Durham – uncovers unsettling truths about his own identity. He realizes that the hate groups that helped to destroy Hayti back in the 1960s were not only intertwined within his complex family history but still exist.

The narrative begins slowly – a common Shiner trait – but eventually snowballs into an avalanche of frenetic action set in a hauntingly realistic past and present. In one of the book's many insightful moments, Robert, a white man surrounded mostly by African-Americans, attends a 1964 live jazz performance at Hayti's Wonderland Theatre. The music flows through him, and Robert experiences an epiphany – the secrets of the cosmos revealed, a greater understanding of himself and his place in the universe. As he cleverly does throughout, Shiner uses the interactions with music to illustrate the characters, both physically and emotionally.

On the surface, Black & White demonstrates the struggles of historical and contemporary racism, but at its core, the story revolves around a son coming to terms with the sins of his father. The always-talented Shiner has produced some of his finest work to date here. Beyond a brief, discursive foray into Ruth's story, he has created a near-perfect novel – steeped in important political and societal issues, neatly wrapped in the trimmings of a mystery story. With Black & White, Lewis Shiner ascends to a literary realm previously reserved for the likes of [author:Michael Chabon] and [author:Jonathan Lethem].

This review originally appeared in The Austin Chronicle, July 4, 2008. ( )

Black & White is an ambitious novel, fearlessly tackling its themes of racism, urban dispossession, murder and more. And yet, the book never really took off for me. Shiner tries to have it all, and - though it's a valiant effort - I didn't feel he was up to the task.

Michael Cooper is returning to the town of his birth, Durham, North Carolina, called there by his dying father who has a secret he wants to share before dying. This secret will plunge Michael back to the 1960s and the black enclave of Hayti. But some things can't stay in the past, and Michael will find his father's history becoming all too real for him.

Firstly, the good parts: Shiner has clearly done incredible research, and the avalanche of detail regarding Durham and surrounds has a palpable realism to it. His characters are believable, and in the main three-dimensional, and the novel moves along at a brisk enough pace.

So what's the problem? Well there's a few. From a prose perspective, Shiner is a competent enough writer, but the book - rich in detail - is entirely lacking in *flavour*. Happy to describe Durham, I had difficulty in connecting with it. Metaphors are few and far between and I would be hard-pressed to ascribe any style to Shiner's prose. Coupled with an unfortunate earnestness that manifests as didactic asides, it consistently broke me out of the narrative.

This is exacerbated by the characterisation. Shiner has made some interesting, very real characters, but he insists on explicating every possible thought or emotion they have, either through unnaturally effusive dialogue or just straight-out telling the reader. Every single emotion - even the most expected and logical - is spelled out, usually repeatedly, and it was frustrating for me. I wanted to root for these characters, but I never felt they were in any danger, and their crystal clear motivations and simplistic feelings made them more run-of-the-mill than they should fine been.

Finally, narrative. Black & White tries to maintain a fine balance between a kind of social realist novel, and a more conventional mass-market thriller. The sections featuring Michael's father fall into the former category, and are by far the strongest part of the book, and the sections featuring Michael himself are the latter, more mass-market type.

Unfortunately, the social realism is much stronger than the thriller aspects, and the latter increasingly dominates the book as it goes on. The result is a narrative-of-convenience riddled with too-pat coincidences and all loose ends tied up into a pretty bow. It's a damned shame that so much of Shiner's better work earlier in the novel is squandered in this screenplay-like finish.

Black & White is not a terrible novel, but ironically its major problem is that in too many ways it lives up to its title. Populated with heroes and villains, an action-movie climax and an all-too-predictable twist, the novel wastes away its quiet charms by trying to give the reader too much. Too much narrative, too much explication, too much emotion and history and politics. The result is ultimately not enough. ( )

I’m 48 years old and it’s discouraging to know and remember that some of the worst acts of racism took place within my lifetime, the church bombing in Georgia where four little girls were murdered, Medgar Evers, the dogs of Birmingham sicced on people for nothing more than wanting to sit at a diners counter. I also have personal memories of it. A neighbor who called black people “coons,” a time of blockbusters, and “changing” neighborhoods. Conversely, I also witnessed the attitudes towards it change through the work of Martin Luther King Jr, and the exposure of the blatant and outrageous attitudes and behavior of racists.

Black and White is about Michael whose father Robert is dying of lung cancer. For reasons known only to himself goes to Durham, North Carolina to die. Michael follows him and discovers that although he was born in Durham there’s no birth certificate for him, and so starts the search into the mysteries of his father’s past that will have reverberations and consequences in Michael’s life.

Black and White tells the story of Michael and his family from their own point of view and in their own time. The story of Michael’s father takes us to 1962 when he comes to Durham as a young, idealistic engineer who wants to make his mark on the world. He takes a job at an engineering firm, and he becomes intrigued by the Hyati section of Durham, the black area of the city where exists a parallel society created and enforced by segregation. Hyati offers Robert everything that’s missing from his buttoned down suburban life, jazz, dancing, and love. In Hyati he meets Mercy Richards a stunningly beautiful black woman who he manages to woe and seduce, and Robert lives a parallel life of his own. Robert is already married to Ruth whose father is a powerful man in Durham white society with his status of leader of the white supremacist group The Night Riders of the Confederacy.

In his job at the engineering firm Robert is in charge of building a highway through the middle of Hyati. The residents have been assured that section that is demolished for the highway will be replaced. The powers that be in Durham, including Robert’s father-in-law, have already made sure that Hyati will not be replaced. In fact, they’ve made plans to demolish that whole section of the city. On his forays into Hyati, Robert meets and befriends Barrett Howard, a black activist who is trying to save Hyati. When Howard goes missing we discover Robert may be involved in his murder, albeit after the fact. It is from this that all the mysteries of Robert’s life and all the other stories flow.

I hope I’m not giving too much away here. When Michael discovers his real mother is black, Mr. Shiner forces us to consider the nature of race. Are you black if you have even one drop of black blood in you? Or the much better proposition, if we’re all given the same respect in life we’re all just people and should be seen as such. A point which I think is driven home excellently by Michael in talking about a dog “a being whose life was black and white who only had to distinguish between friends, intruders and food.”

At the core of Black and White are some truths or past realities. Hyati did exist in Durham, North Carolina, it was razed in the 60’s for a highway to be put through. And of course, real groups such as KKK did exist at the time, as did the racism described by Mr. Shiner which at this point of time seem to be so gross as to make one wonder how such an attitude could exist and flourish, but it did and that’s what we need to be cognizant of and vigilant about.

At this point in his career I think the only writer Lewis Shiner is in competition with is, himself. Shiner has always been good at verisimilitude, being able to create a scene for the reader then put you in the scene, living with those characters and caring about them. The plot drew me in. I constantly found myself wanting to know what happens next. And found myself fully involved with the characters and like at a movie, at times I found myself having a visceral reaction to what I was reading the sense of being at the edge of my seat, racing to see what happens to the characters if they‘re able to get out of the predicament they find themselves in. Black and White is larger in scope and depth of subject than Shiner’s previous books, although it plays to some of the same rhythms such as estrangement from a father. As this is also a theme I’ve encountered in my writing that could be well attributed to the fact that the generation of my father and Mr. Shiner’s came from a different world where the fathers didn’t interact much with the children. Fathers went to work and provided for the family and the mothers took care of the children. Early in the book I found some of the dialogue a little clunky. It was chunky with information as if Mr. Shiner is trying to assimilate the information from his research himself but that passes quickly. At times Michael acts impulsively, doing something that just seems like it’s being done to drive the action of the plot ahead and not like how a person might react in a similar situation. Sometimes I didn’t agree with how the characters felt and reacted maybe that’s like life people may act differently than we might expect them to. And perhaps, the characters are entitled to feel the way they do about the situations they’re in. There is a rapprochement at the end that feels inauthentic to everything that has preceded it, and a little awkward in accommodating it.

I think Lewis Shiner is one of the better authors we have writing today and not only do I think you should read this book but you should also check out Mr. Shiners other books such as Glimpses, and Say Goodbye. ( )