A few weeks back I reviewed Caryl Phillips’s new novel, Dancing in the Dark, for the Baltimore Sun. (In print it appeared right alongside Lizzie Skurnick’s review of On Beauty. The bloggers are taking over! We are your overlords.) It didn’t appear on the website, so I can’t provide a link–but I can cut and paste! I liked the book a good deal more than Brooke Allen, who registered respectful disappointment in the NYTBR last weekend. Until near the end of the novel, I actually thought I agreed with some of Allen’s misgivings, but the denouement utterly changed my mind about the entire book.
Dancing in the Dark is a fictional account of the life of Bert Williams, a black American vaudeville performer who found theatrical fame by portraying, in blackface, a character that amounted to a racist caricature. Here’s some of what I wrote for the Sun:
One of the most famous entertainers to don blackface on the American stage was a black man. He was Bert Williams, a native West Indian who emigrated to the U.S. with his parents as a boy and became half of the vaudeville team Williams and Walker, the first black performers to make it to Broadway. In Dancing in the Dark, Caryl Phillips ventures to imagine the unknown inner life of this enigmatic historical figure. What his keen novelist’s eye discerns behind the multiple masks Williams wore is quietly harrowing.
…The existence of Phillips’s Bert Williams is a trial. We sense this even before we know of the compromises that make it so difficult. From the outset, the prose has a somber, almost funereal timbre–the antithesis of the low comedy that characterizes Bert’s “foolish blackface antics” on stage. A bracing tonal chiaroscuro results from this juxtaposition of the “clownish roughness and loud vulgarity” that he projects and the profound gravity he contains. Bert cultivates this distance between outside and inside, as though a private existence of monkish reserve could cancel out the exaggerated exuberance of his stage persona.
…The power of Dancing in the Dark builds slowly and almost imperceptibly as Bert shuffles from mirror to stage to mirror again, rubbing away a little more of himself each time he removes his makeup. Together, the book’s somberness and its intricate introspection make for a sometimes glacial pace. But the reader’s patience is ultimately rewarded. All of the tensions and contradictions engendered by Bert’s situation are released in the crises at the end of the novel, and with them comes a world of feeling that has been dammed up to bursting.
On one hand, Bert’s black audience grows increasingly disapproving of his trademark character. In expressing their unease, they merely echo the reservations that he has silently harbored from the first time the burnt cork touched his skin. But in an astonishingly moving scene, Bert, having been confronted with objections that he shares, finds himself defending the character he plays–“he shuffles a little, and he may be slow-witted, but we surely recognize this poor man. The essence of my performance is that we know and sympathize with this unfortunate creature.”
On the other hand, the white audience whose approval underwrites Bert’s livelihood will tolerate no divergence from the caricature they adore. Emboldened by the examples of the proud black professionals and activists around him in Harlem, Bert seizes an opportunity to perform on film without his makeup. The cold reception with which this is met leaves him a lost man for whom all the pathos of the ordinary has-been is multiplied by the baleful effects of racism, politics, and self-loathing.
There were times, I’ll admit again, when the novel almost lost me, it was so slow-moving and lugubrious. But it all added up, I thought, to something pretty amazing.