[Truculence and passion are integral to "The Chaneysville Incident."] Bradley employs a sophisticated past-present structure, built on a sequence of sometimes interlocking flashbacks. The pace is slow, the digressions frequent, and John Washington's professorial sedulousness and hauteur are often grating.

All the material in the book is exposition, really—discovered, then painstakingly communicated: it represents nothing less than a triumph that this basically undramatic material is almost always suspenseful and fascinating.

This is a book that knows exactly what it's doing. Even the literary echoes (of Faulkner, Baldwin, Ralph Ellison, Warren's "All the King's Men," among others) ring mockingly, exude a bracing irony.

John Washington's complaints about the limitations of history perfectly express the conviction that black people must, by virtue of their experience and their suffering, perceive the world differently than do whites. And, when we finally reach it, the many-layered dream of Africa that lies at...