This Leo Robson essay on Ralph Ellison is the single dumbest thing I have ever read in the LRB. Only a radically tone-deaf reader could make an assessment this triumphantly condescending: “Invisible Man, for all its intricacies and coiled ironies, has an element of stridency, and Ellison’s pronouncements leave little room for debate about his views.” Robson clearly thinks he’s much smarter than Ellison, and that arrogance makes him a disastrously bad reader of an endlessly complex book — and an endlessly complex person.
UPDATE: Coming back to this, I find myself wondering whether Robson grasps the difference between a strident book and a book with strident characters in it. I’ve taught Invisible Man several times over the years, and my most thoughtful and engaged students have had lengthy debates about how we should assess the invisible man’s account of his situation. If Ellison left “little room for debate about his views,” what have my students and I been debating?