Himes' last and unfinished novel, Plan B is a stirring, bold, uncompromising, thought-provoking and yet deeply flawed work.

No other book I've encountered (except perhaps Ralph Ellison's [book:Invisible Man]) so excellently captures the political and social conditions of racial oppression and militant response. Much of the African-American literature that preceded and followed it (including the rest of Himes' own work) seems wholly focused on merely reporting the degree of American racism and apartheid, often presented through either broken and victimized narrators or angry, black men who vent their rage wherever they can (Richard Wright's novels). That approach (which either subtly ignores or blatantly rejects the possibility for a radical response to racism) is ultimately an ineffective, unrealistic and politically debilitating way of presenting American racial dynamics.

Plan B partially corrects that flaw by presenting one of the most vividly realized literary accounts of racial unrest and revolution ever conceived. The novel is at its best when describing the murder of cops, the massive and genocidal overreaction by police and military to comparatively limited rebellion, the eventual assassination of leaders of the white establishment, and the political and social conditions that caused all this to happen in the first place. What makes the novel so good is that these conditions are pretty exactly the state of American in the late 1960s. You get the sense that a full out race war could have happened so very easily under slightly different circumstances.

Where Plan B fails is in the chapters about a black businessman/philanthropist's ancestry and upbringing, which alternate with the chapters about civil unrest and ultimately make up half the book. While these two strands do unite at the end of the novel (albeit very weakly, as the conclusion of the unfinished novel was cobbled together from sparse notes after Himes' death), it still seems as though Himes was writing two separately stories without really knowing how to best combine them.

Those lesser chapters are somehow more brutal and unsettling than the chapters about full-out race war. In scenes reminiscient of Voltaire's [book:Candide], Himes recounts lynchings and rapes in a way that's supposed to make them cleverly funny. Even though I could see what Himes was trying to accomplish, I had a very hard time stomaching these descriptions. There's something too miniature and personal about this satire, which renders it much more disturbing and unsuccessful than Himes' satire of race relations on the national scale.

Rather than buying a copy of this book, I decided to just photocopy the chapters (roughly half the book) that dealt with rebellion, while doing my best to forget about the other ones. The result is, in my opinion, a much stronger, coherent novel with a clearer and more direct sense of purpose. I'm sure, though, that others would disagree with me.

As far as I know, there's only this one edition of the book in print, which is published by the University Press of Mississippi. That makes it expensive to buy but ultimately more rewarding to read, as UPM has included a lengthy introduction that places this work in context, explains how Himes came to write it and gives a stronger sense of how this unfinished novel would have been completed.

In short, it's an unsettling, uneven, ultimately unsuccessful novel that happens to include the most stirring and radical scenes of rebellion I've ever encountered in liturature and one of the best examples of social satire from the Black Power era ever written. It's an exciting yet troubling artifact from an exciting yet troubling time. ( )