It will be hard going for the novice looking for an approach to the primary material.
Yet if there is any limitation here, it is that the style of the book itself - primarily aimed at the academic reader - is often ponderous. The Signifying Monkey has the feel of a seminal work, likely to reshape the course of black American literary criticism for years. Besides the work of Houston Baker, I cannot think of a more exciting reassessment of black literature that has been published in many years.
Gates' overview of Afro-American writing (mostly fiction, but with asides to other literary forms) is comprehensive, almost mind-boggling, and above all brilliantly original. Both writers have been honored by numerous awards, yet reading their criticism in tandem, I often felt that they themselves had read different works that coincidentally shared the same titles and authors. Johnson has published three volumes of his own fiction. Gates has spent the last few years resuscitating from obscurity a number of early texts by black American authors (and midwifing them back into print).
Both authors are academics (Gates at Cornell, Johnson at the University of Washington). FOR THE LIFE of me, I can't imagine two studies of Afro-American fiction more extreme in their differences than these two volumes by Henry Louis Gates Jr.
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