Native Son tells the story of impoverished twenty-year-old Bigger Thomas who lives in a poor area on Chicago’s South Side in the 1930’s. Published over eighty years ago to both enduring and critical responses from many other African-American writers, including – perhaps most famously – James Baldwin’s Notes on a Native Son. Much like Cole’s other recommendations, there’s no doubt about it that Native Son is a sobering read. And so it was that when I was thumbing through the many unread tomes in my apartment the other day, I quickly landed on Richard Wright’s most famous novel, and settled down to read it, not really knowing what I was in for.
I’ve gone on to read – and love – a number of the books Cole recommended me, including the powerful and poignant Between the World and Me by Ta-Nehisi Coates and The Collected Poems of Langston Hughes. Of course, Wright's life was fascinating in and of itself.The first time I remember hearing about the book Native Son by Richard Wright was when Cole Brown – a previous guest on my podcast – chose it as one of his desert island books. An idea actually occurred to me while watching this: someone should make a feature film about the making of "Native Son." From what I've read, the production faced many obstacles and setbacks, both physical and ideological, and I think the story behind this would be fascinating - especially the difficulty of an author playing his own creation while trying to maintain his artistic integrity. In the era just before the McCarthy hearings and the blacklist, a feature film released to the public that was even half as potent as Wright's novel would have been commendable. Maybe it was a bad idea to even attempt to make Wright's novel into a film, but one must give him and the filmmakers credit for trying. In film, you don't get motivation, you get action, and the novel "Native Son" was all about hidden motivations and desires. But, if you look at this as a simple B-movie melodrama with a racial subtext that was badly missing from almost all of the films of its day, it isn't bad. As an admirer of Wright's written work - especially "Native Son" - I had incredibly low expectations for several reasons: there was next to no budget, the cast and crew (including the starring role) were all amateurs, the director was not American and had never made an American film before this, the film had to be shot in Argentina, and "Native Son" is such a dense, complex, psychological piece of work to begin with.
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