Author’s debut has statement on race

Can a debut novel be a masterpiece of cultural criticism? Chanelle Benz makes an earnest effort to answer that question in the affirmative.

“The Gone Dead” is a startling work that will set your skin tingling and interrupt your sleep. It explores racial issues — old, new and forever unsettled — but to define a novel this sweeping by those terms alone seems too reductionist.

After her grandmother dies, Billie James, a grant writer, returns to the Mississippi Delta for the first time in 30 years to claim her inheritance — $5,000 and a half-dilapidated house that was once her father's. Billie's late parents were Clifton James, a renowned black poet, and Pia, a white medievalist.

The house is foreign to city-girl Billie but also familiar. She was there, at age 4, the night her father died.

It was an accident, the locals say: He fell and hit his head. But as Billie learns more about that time, this town and its people, she unravels a tangled story involving her parents' interracial marriage, their wealthy white neighbors, the Mcgees, and the weighty legacy of Jim Crow. She learns what it means to belong to a place where, if you are black, life can turn sideways at any moment.

Reading Benz is exciting and unnerving. She excels at capturing the subtle gradations of her characters who can be upstanding but also shady. • "The Gone Dead" (Ecco, 304 pages, $26.99) by Chanelle Benz

For example, Harlan Mcgee, the easygoing but rudderless son of landowner Jim Mcgee, is the quintessential good ol' boy who, on his way to the bar, will comply with a billboard instructing drivers to "HONK IF U LOVE JESUS."

As children, Jim and Billie’s father were best friends.

"There was a time I knew Cliff like I knew my own body. His walk. The way he breathed, the length of the air he took into his chest," Jimmy recollects. "I loved Cliff, loved him."

Then they hit adolescence and, as was dictated by the rules back then, each withdrew to his designated side of the color line. Adult Cliff dies young. Adult Jim goes to church twice a week. He is a good husband and a good father — but he's also keeping secrets about what happened to Cliff leading up to his death.

Melvin Hurley, a poetry scholar, is Cliff James' biographer, writing a tome that he hopes will place the poet on "the pantheon of black genius." Hurley is an intellectual with the savvy to recognize the significance of Cliff's work, but he also is selfservingly ambitious.

The first third of Benz's novel is beautifully lyrical. It calls to mind the rolling, almost musical style of James Baldwin's prose and mirrors his way of eloquently capturing the ugliest stories. The mystery creates urgency during the second third, when reading feels like trying to fill a bucket with a hole in it. It's not going fast enough. You want to know more — now.

But the ending feels unsatisfyingly ambiguous given the current context of racial affairs. Have things really changed all that much since the days of Jim Crow and the night riders? Then as now, injustices go unpunished.

Even so, Benz could become one of the most prominent voices of her generation based on how good this book is. There is magnificent promise here, awaiting full realization.