Twelfth & Race

An awkward, simplistic treatment of race dooms Goodman's heavy-handed latest (after Child of My Right Hand). The novel focuses on the racial obsessions of protagonist Richie Gordon, a Jewish Brooklyn native now living in fictional Calhoun City, Kansas. The book opens in 1972 when Richie's teenaged mother runs away from home, abandoning her toddler son, and picks back up in 2000%E2%80%94now Richie is a successful brand manager dating the mother of the child who bears his name as a result of identity-theft. Twenty-five year old LaTisha is a racial caricature whose skin Richie describes as "the blackest thing for miles around." Indeed, the novel's baffling, blunt treatment of race steers the text towards satire or farce. It often feels as if Goodman (director of the creative writing program at Miami University in Ohio) has deliberately rendered his characters as two-dimensional stereotypes, but the text fails to explore and deconstruct these typecasts. Some of the book's problems have to do with perspective and narration, both of which shift unexpectedly and apparently without purpose: in one scene, the author describes Richie's mother's thoughts in the third-person and then shifts to the first person, seemingly without any reason, so that it seems as if the author were suddenly speaking, and not Richie's mother. In the end, an uninteresting story line and the author's failure to compellingly investigate the issue of race makes this a frustrating read. (Mar.)