Richard Wright was a contemporary of Zora Neale Hurston, a Black man who criticized Hurston, an unapologetically Black women, for catering to white readers. While Hurston’s novels dig deep into the feeling lives of Black Americans through everyday encounters, Wright wrote The Outsider, a behemoth of a novel about the thoughts of one Black American named Cross Damon in exceptional circumstances. I struggled to read the text and switched to audio.

Two things stand out to me about The Outsider: it is emotionally neutered and the timeline is messy. Cross Damon is twenty-six years old, living on the south side of Chicago in 1950, and just learned that his teenaged girlfriend is pregnant. He also has a wife and three children with her. Wright establishes that Cross feels shame around lust because his mother didn’t have her son the Christian way either, so she projects her shame onto him. His friends give him a hard time for sliding into alcoholism. Okay, the story is off and running, but we know little of how Cross feels about all of this. His emotions toward his wife are rather clinical, especially when he recalls how nervous she was around white people: “He understood now; it was the helplessness of dependence that made her fret so. Men made themselves and women were made only through men.”

A train accident changes everything, and Cross moves to New York City where he assumes a new identity and is taken in by Communists. Like you do. The Outsider reminds me a little bit of reading Lolita because we are in Cross’s head, and it’s a cold, destructive place that wants to convince you nothing bad is happening. And yet we still know nothing of Cross’s emotional state. He rationalizes, “His life had become a vast system of pretense; one act of bad faith necessitated another, and in order to prove the sincerity of a new lie he had to fall back upon lying still further.” Although Richard Wright wanted to write intellectual novels about Black Americans, and he felt his contemporaries had a duty to do so as well, he often removes the emotional response, something I found perplexing.

The other issue I took with The Outsider is the timeline. Within twenty-four hours, he’s taken in by the Communist party and claiming he knew certain members well. One communist’s wife says she’ll kill herself if Cross leaves her. Really?? There is also a lot of female “whimpering” in Wright’s novel, to the point where the word enraged me. I wasn’t convinced Wright knows how to write female characters, as they are smitten with Cross in mere minutes, letting him, a stranger, make long-term financial decisions for them, sleeping with him, threatening to kill themselves, etc. When Cross decides he loves the wife of a communist, he thinks, “…he wanted that sensitive heart of hers to be his monitor, to check him from sinking into brutality, from succumbing to cruelty, and she wanted to love him for his being black because she thought he was an innocent victim.” By this point, the guilt from his mother’s projections and his alcoholism have disappeared, oddly.

Lastly, because the novel only takes place over a few days, you’d wonder why it’s 672 pages. After a pivotal scene that is described in detail, the communists ask Cross what happened, hypothesizing the narrative. In detail. And then the police do the same. And then the district attorney. Etc. We keep going over the same plot point again and again. Well, except those twenty-seven pages during which Cross is spouting all his theories on Communism. He says things like, “Now, during the past thirty-five years, under the ideological banner of Dialectical Materialism, a small group of ruthless men in Russia seized political power and the entire state apparatus and established dictatorship.” Meanwhile, the other characters just stand there and listen, as if Wright had paper dolls in his hands and forgot to animate some of them. Readers are not provided convincing evidence that Cross is an intellectual, so he sounds like someone who thinks he has it all figured out, and you’re the dummy for not being on the same page — except he has no clue what he’s talking about. Honestly, it felt like Wright wanted to shares his political thoughts and did so in fiction through Cross, but he should have written a non-fiction collection of essays and used Cross as a hypothetical person in a situation. Truly, I was glad when The Outsider was over.