Much of Aida Levy-Hussen's compelling How to Read African American Literature: Post-Civil Rights Fiction and the Task of Interpretation is dedicated to overturning prescriptive critical and academic paradigms. With this in mind, allow me to dispense with the usual expectations of book reviews, which generally summarize the given work with praise and then remark upon a weakness or oversight. I begin instead with the most glaring problem of the book: its title. While readers might expect a guidebook to reading African American literature, on the final page, Levy-Hussen clarifies, “I hope that the titular ‘how to’ will be read, not as a self-righteous command, but as a deliberative and inconclusive invocation of the question how?” (171). By eschewing dogmatic readings and interweaving multiple critical modes, Levy-Hussen self-consciously provides us with a model, but not the model, of how to read African American fiction of the post-civil rights era. Though such a broad-minded approach to textual study is admirable, the title does a notable disservice to this remarkable book, which offers a pointed critique of trendy academic debates and presentist desires that too often occlude the complexity and contradictions of black life. “How to Read African American Literature” fails to capture the insightful hermeneutics on display in Levy-Hussen's luminous readings. This is a book that deserves a more pointed and accurate title to honor its argumentative heft and critical acumen.

One of the most important recent debates in African American literary studies involves the importance of the slave past to understanding our contemporary moment. Will an often wrenching engagement with the antebellum period illuminate our fraught political present and bring personal healing? Or are such conclusions motivated by ahistorical desires that deny both the truth and the inaccessibility of past narratives? Levy-Hussen brings clarity to a debate that can deny the ambiguity and multiplicity of much recent African American fiction. She begins by identifying two dominant modes of reading that have largely defined critical encounters with contemporary narratives of slavery. With its “promise of reparative return,” therapeutic reading “speaks to the desire to make sense of an unredeemed past and its painful legacy and to locate agency and a capacity for social change in the act of reading” (4). This form of interpretation assumes that historical repair is possible while presenting racial identity through fixed and at times misguided paradigms. Critics of the therapeutic approach affirm what Levy-Hussen calls prohibitive reading, based upon “the zealous rejection of an unfinished, accessible, or demanding past” (19).

While Levy-Hussen at times overstates the polarization of these two reading practices, in finding a middle way between these modes she offers supple close readings of important texts. Her analyses of Toni Morrison's Beloved (1987) and Jazz (1992) sparkle with surprising turns, no small feat for novels that have launched hundreds of articles and books. In her discussion of David Bradley's The Chaneysville Incident (1981), Octavia Butler's Kindred (1979), Andrea Lee's Sarah Philips (1984), and many other novels, Levy-Hussen demonstrates that the very assumptions of therapeutic and prohibitive reading are undone by the texts themselves, which escape neat closures of any kind. While she finds virtue in both therapeutic and prohibitive reading, she explains that more nuanced approaches are required to appreciate the complexity of contemporary African American fiction. Here again the title of her book demonstrates its shortcomings as I wished that Levy-Hussen might have codified and named her own reading practice more clearly.

Much of How to Read African American Literature’s innovative force derives from Levy-Hussen's engagement with issues that have received scant attention in recent studies of African American fiction. For example, she brings masochism and depression into her reading of the contemporary narrative of slavery to highlight what she identifies as a melancholic turn that recognizes the loss of civil rights idealism. She shifts critical focus from the inaccessible slave past to a post-civil rights past imbued with grief and defeatism. To this end, Levy-Hussen employs an impressive range of critical paradigms from queer theory to trauma studies to psychoanalysis, as she presents a dynamic encounter with the possibilities of African American fiction. This is a pioneering book that models the kind of rigorous scholarly engagement necessary to make sense of both contemporary narratives of slavery and their critical reception.