The Water Dancer
Ta-Nehisi Coates · 2019
Coates's debut novel fuses the slave narrative with magical realism: a young enslaved man discovers a supernatural power rooted in memory and loss. Densely imagined and politically serious, it represents the moment America's most important essayist turned to fiction to say what essays couldn't.
The case against
Coates the essayist keeps elbowing aside Coates the novelist; characters deliver polished arguments instead of dialogue. Conduction, the memory-powered teleportation at the book's center, stays vague for hundreds of pages and then resolves the plot whenever needed. The middle, in Philadelphia, drifts. A first novel by a great writer who had not yet learned to trust scenes.
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