Redmond must be commended for his dogged 35-year dedication to the manuscripts that Dumas left behind at his death. a grab bag of forms, and its range reveals a writer given to experimentation. One need not look very far for such echoes in Dumas’s fiction, but the nature of his writing is such that I doubt it can be flattened. Certain kinds of renown – many readers will know how Dumas died before they have read a page of him – tend to flatten or caricature the work, encouraging readers to seek anticipatory echoes of a terminal struggle.

A new introduction by John Keene provides valuable coordinates for Dumas’s fables and highlights the importance of Dumas’s political convictions after the killing of Breonna Taylor and George Floyd. Dumas was an accomplished poet, and when he gathers up for a moment of sublimity in his fiction, it is to underscore quiet isolation and the need to escape. Dumas’s vernacular writing is lustrous and well-worn. This new edition of Echo Tree gives us the fullest sense of the writer’s stereoscopic vision, in which popular uprisings are provoked by acts of violence, and by the Great Depression. And within this world of expanded possibilities and persistent, violent white supremacy, we often find Dumas’s men talking about what might happen next.

This porousness lends a mythic shimmer to daily life. Henry Dumas’s stories frequently take place in a United States much as we know it today, but in which the doors to other worlds are slightly more than ajar.

Henry dumas echo tree