The trouble with The Terrible Twos is that [Reed has] said it all before and said it much better. This time out, he's picked another genre to tear apart with his imposition of varied forms and combinations of perspective. Just as he used Antigone in The Last Days of Louisiana Red to create a brilliant satire that collapsed under the strain of its near-misogyny, and just as he used the western for Yellow Back Radio Broke-Down, the detective story for Mumbo Jumbo, the slave narrative and Uncle Tom's Cabin for Flight to Canada, Reed weaves Rastafarianism and a reverse of the Todd Clifton dummy sequence from Invisible Man together with Dickens's A Christmas Carol in The Terrible Twos. Again we get the self-obsessed harpies, the mission Indians, the black hero who takes over the white form (unlike Todd Clifton, Black Peter is not controlled by whites who speak through his mouth—he speaks through theirs), the dumb black street hustlers who get into a game too complicated for them to understand, the corruption of Christianity, the secret society of powerful white bosses, the argument that preliterate custom and belief are just as good as modern civilization (if not better) and the beleaguered black hero who has woman problems (Reed touches on the sexual provincialism of black women, which didn't begin to change until the late 1960s when they had to compete with liberated and liberal white women for the affections of black men, but he doesn't do anything with that proverbial hot potato).
I'm not saying that Reed should abandon his concerns, but I am saying that for all the literary appropriations in The Terrible Twos, it hasn't the level of invention that made his best work succeed. There is too much predictability, too much dependence on revelation through conversation and interior monologue. Most of the mysteries must be explained by the characters, and what we do discover through their narratives isn't very interesting. When the President, for instance, is taken into hell, what he sees are the ghosts of presidents and vice presidents past, and there follow heavy-handed scenes of contrition and retribution—Truman grieving over the atom bomb, Rockefeller chained to the corpses of the Attica victims, etc. When Santa Claus and the President get their chance to speak out against the commercialization of Christmas on the one hand and the manipulation of the country by industrialists on the other, the clichés resound. But since Reed considers this novel a surrealist variation on the social realist novel of economic complaint, maybe he thought he should pop the corn rather than serve it in hard kernels. There are some funny passages along the way, however. There is even an attempt to infuse his surreal puppet show with realistic relationships, especially on an erotic level, and this brings what freshness there is to the novel. It also suggests that Reed may soon examine the range of sexual and social attractions that a multiracial society makes so possible, especially since the passage from Europe to the Third World can sometimes take place within only a few city blocks. If that is what he intends for his sequels—The Terrible Threes and The Terrible Fours—then the world he has developed, one quilted with endless allusions, mythology, improvisation and concentric circles of time and culture, could give birth to the potential so basic to the social contract and to the diversity of this country—Ishmael Reed's All-American Novel. The Terrible Twos, unfortunately, is mostly a shadow of his former work, and a shadow that tells us little we don't already know. (pp. 618-19)
Stanley Crouch, "Kinships and Aginships," in The Nation, Vol. 234, No. 20, May 22, 1982, pp. 617-19.
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