David Bradley gambled that he could work the historical experience of black people in this country into a successful novel without writing a conventional historical novel. As it turns out, Bradley lost his gamble, for The Chaneysville Incident is not successful, at least not as a novel. Too much of it is thinly disguised history, rather than deeply felt, imaginatively transformed experience….

Bradley filters his historical material through the consciousness of the novel's narrator, a 30-ish black historian named John Washington…. The novel's principal action is Washington's … immersion in his family's history in an attempt to solve the mystery of his father's suicide and complete the historical research that had preoccupied his father in the years before his death. Large quantities of data on the situation of black people in America, from the origins of the slave trade until the present, are or become part of Washington's understanding...