SOURCE: "Race, Justice and Integrity in the Old South," in The Wall Street Journal, July 26, 1993, p. A9.

[Bawer is an American critic and editor. In the following largely positive review, he discusses the spiritual development of the characters in A Lesson before Dying.]

Bayonne, the fictitious Louisiana river town in which Ernest J. Gaines has set all eight of his novels, is not far from the Mississippi lowlands immortalized by William Faulkner. Yet if Faulkner's lush, penetrating prose seems eminently suited to the region's sultry climate and racial tensions, Mr. Gaines's novels are written in a low-key, matter-of-fact prose that may surprise the first-time reader.

Consider, for example, Mr. Gaines's newest novel, A Lesson Before Dying, which takes place during the late 1940s. Jefferson, a guileless young black man, has been wrongly accused of complicity in the murder of a white liquor-store owner. His attorney tells the all-white...