Word: novelized
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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...year old author is latest novel, Sons of Darkness, Sons of Light, is not quite on par with his previous effort. The Man Who Cried I Am. published in 1967: but then, that novel was a literary masterpiece. Sons of Darkness is about the American racial dilemma and the catastrophic events it produces in 1973. But more than that. Sons of Darkness is about the rights human beings have and the wrongs which they suffer. Its fundamental message is that when a society, no matter what its political structure or philosophy, so oppresses a people as to choke off their...
...plot of Sons of Darkness is as painfully simple-and as compley-as the historical relationship between whites and blacks in America. The novel is set in New York City in the year 1973. Eugene Browning number two man in the Institute for Racial Justice (IRJ) an Urban League-type organization, has reached the conclusion that his country really does not want him. His country is and always has been trying to kill him and his kind...
...meaning from his words. His ability to flesh out characters and scenes is a pleasure to observe: he has an exciting way of making his characters come alive-not jump but flow off the pages seep into the reader's mind so that, at a certain point in the novel, the character suddenly emerges, fully-fleshed and fully-human. Quickly and easily Williams skerches the relationship between his central characters: Browning, the Don. a now-inactive Mafia kingpin, and Itzhak Hod, the triggerman...
...strengths, the novel also has its faults. Its ending, for instance. leaves one vaguely disappointed. Everything ends too well for the central characters. Browning, the Don. and Hod all emerge unscathed by the events of the book-as if. after The Man Who Cried I Am, Williams wanted to write a book that would end happily, or at least, not tragically. At the novel's end, the domestic scene is still exploding and another perhaps final international war (the United States versus China) is imminent: but the central characters have been removed from the scene of action...
Perhaps the denouement of the novel is the only way it could end. After the cop's assassination, all three main characters gradually slip off center stage to return to the orbit of their private lives as events move forward at their own dizzying momentum. At the end of the novel, Browning is just what he was before: a middle class black college professor, still essentially moderate but a little wiser...