Whatever else may be said, and there's apt to be a lot said about David Bradley and his second novel, "The Chaneysville Incident," the man's a writer.

What he can do, at a pretty high level of energy, is synchronize five different kinds of rhetoric, control a complicated plot, manage a good-sized cast of characters, convey a lot of information, handle an intricate time scheme, pull off a couple of final tricks that dramatize provocative ideas, and generally keep things going for 200,000 words. That's about two and a half books for most of us….

John Washington [is] the book's narrator, and, like the book's author, he is young, black and a college professor. John Washington teaches history and lives in Philadelphia with a white psychiatrist named Judith….

[John is summoned by a] disreputable old man named Jack Crawley [who] is dying and has asked for him. It's the second such summons. When John was 12 and his father, Moses Washington, had just been buried, "old Jack" first asked for the boy….

Young John becomes old Jack's pupil in woodsmanship, hunting and whisky-drinking; he also becomes the chief listener to Jack's stories, and from them learns a great deal, much of it about trouble between the races. The principal character in Jack's stories is Moses Washington. John's father was a legendary moonshiner and eccentric; feared by many for his violence and cunning, he accumulated wealth and influence during his lifetime and died a mysterious death. (p. 7)

[As] John sits with the old man in his shack on the wrong side of the hill, he becomes obsessed with solving the mystery of his own father's death. This solution, though, depends on the solution of a far older mystery, that of "the Chaneysville incident" from which the novel takes its name. The incident took place in the time of the underground railroad, when 13 runaway slaves, about to be recaptured, were shot instead—at, so the tale goes, their own urgent request—and buried in 13 tenderly laid-out graves.

By this point in the book, John Washington has taken over old Jack's role as storyteller, and the listener now, tensely enough, is the white woman, Judith. (pp. 7, 20)

[Mr. Bradley's more favored characters display an anti-Christian bias.] It begins, deceptively enough, as a minor enough matter and becomes basic to the expression of a concept about death that is one of the book's two major themes.

The other theme involves Mr. Bradley's conception of history. It is, as a matter of fact, mirrored in the change in John Washington's storytelling manner…. At first, quite expectedly, John is professorial; he tends to talk, as Judith points out, in little lectures. They even incorporate verbal footnotes….

As the book goes on, John becomes more an involved storyteller and less a detached historian. He is saying, indirectly, that a historian cannot really be detached. By the climactic part of the book, he is relying on narrative imagination, not research, to understand what really happened in Chaneysville and to his father. Truth in history, we are invited to consider, may not be determined by facts. Though they come first, what really happened—as old Jack demonstrated to John, and John now demonstrates to Judith—can only be learned by creating from those facts a story that satisfies them all.

From this notion about history, the book's other central theme emerges. It is introduced halfway along, when John Washington is still talking and writing like a professor, if by now a rather impassioned one: "That is what the Slave Trade was all about. Not death from poxes and musketry...