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THE LYNCHERS by John Edgar Wideman

THE LYNCHERS

by John Edgar Wideman

Pub Date: April 25th, 1973
ISBN: 0557314836
Publisher: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich

This novel about four black men's plan to lynch a white cop in blackface disintegrates as do its peculiarly unsympathetic protagonists — Wilkerson the intellectual; crazy silent janitor Rice; Saunders the mug; and the crippled Littleman who dreamed up this symbolic riposte to the Klansmen who made burning and hanging Negroes an American form of art. Unfortunately, action is buried under a kind of artsy self-consciousness (much irrelevant flashback and rhetoric) so baroquely verbiose as to obscure even the climax — in which, apparently, the distrustful conspirators more or less destroy each other and their morally dubious plan — revealing banal truths about means versus ends and oppressed becoming oppressors. A clever idea run aground.