Charts Coates’s re-entry as a public intellectual; it also marks a shift in his approach. Instead of focusing mainly on the American experience, most of the book takes place abroad ... Instead of being the singular voice or the incomparable expert, Coates offers himself as an ally.
Framed as a letter to Coates’s writing students at Howard University, and it is not a monograph about Palestine but a meditation on the relationship between aesthetics and politics, as well as a kind of travelogue ... This is a book that asks to be evaluated as a piece of writing, and I will pay it the homage of holding it to the standard it sets for itself. In its guise as an aesthetic effort, it is not entirely successful ... It does not unearth new information, or paint much of a portrait of the places Coates visits. It is an aesthetic treatise and a compilation of personal reflections ... Frustratingly abstract, full of personal revelations and grand pronouncements without much in the way of concrete (or especially stylish) observation.
Coates is living the advice he gives to his students in his book. He is casting off what he sees as the white standards of writing and its addiction to 'complexity' and stating, instead, his version of moral clarity ... I am not exactly sure what to make of The Message, which, more than anything, is about the moral conversion of a famous writer.
The book he is promoting feels strangely out of step, slipshod and assembled in haste. The Message is stitched together with haphazard reporting, and it suppurates with such self-regard that it feels composed by the very enemy of a writer who has so strenuously scorned carelessness and vague pronouncement. It is a public offering seemingly designed for private ends, an artifact of deep shame and surprising vanity which reads as if it had been conjured to settle its author’s soul. The precepts on craft and narrative gather underfoot, tangled and unheeded ... Why doesn’t Coates follow his own excellent advice? He walks the land, but lost in reverie, in communion with his own questions and not with the world around him ... His gloss on censorship, its past and present, is dizzyingly brisk, and limited to the fate of his own book. An unwelcome impression begins to gather, that these places, these people, are being relegated to bit players in the larger, more exigent story of Coates’s intellectual evolution, his contemplation of his career and legacy ... The description of Coates’s time in Palestine contains nothing that feels new to those sympathetic to his perspective, and nothing that would meaningfully challenge those who disagree, in part because he does not entertain any objections ... Stewardship must be demonstrated, not simply announced, and to demonstrate care for a story requires a rigor, a labor of learning and craft, missing in The Message.
A generous reading might interpret Coates’s self-exposure as a lure for drawing readers into communion with his narrative of intellectual and emotional discovery ... He doesn’t engage with Senegalese writing or music at all ... Coates is equally disappointing in the Middle East ... This isn’t a takedown. Coates’s missed opportunities don’t suggest diminished talent or cultural significance. He’s taken important risks here even though they haven’t all played out profitably ... Takes a half step toward task fulfillment. Perhaps Coates’s future projects will hit full stride.
Coates’s dismissal of complication amplifies the certainty of the book’s title, which, given the biblical landscape of the book’s second half, appears to allude to the fierce truth-telling of the prophets. Coates seems almost to put himself on that plane ... To absorb the rest of the essay, to reread and reread it, is to sense that his rendering of his experience inside Yad Vashem is strategic as well as sincere, a means of inoculating himself against charges of insensitivity or worse as he becomes purely polemical and takes up, without any complication, the Palestinian anti-colonial narrative ... Willful blind spots ... Coates’s candor is riveting ... Purity of argument is Coates’s desire; complexity, his self-declared enemy. In this, in his refusal to wrestle with conflicting realities, the essay feels desperate. It feels devoid of the layers and depths of the most profound moral writing.
Contemplative and confessional ... A masterful reading of the long history of American, British, French, South African, and Israeli politicians working to shore up the legitimacy of the state of Israel by denying the rights of Palestinians. But these passages—while powerful in their logic—are less affecting than when Coates simply contrasts his experiences of entering the Old City of Jerusalem through the Lion’s Gate accompanied by Arabs ... The author rejects the comforts of literary celebrity in order to understand how writing might illuminate one of the signal outrages of this world.
Personal and introspective ... Filled with startling revelations that show a writer grappling with how his work fits into history and the present moment. Coates believes that writing can change the world. Achieving this mission is arduous, vital and necessary. These masterful essays will leave readers convinced that Coates is up to the task.
Coates presents three blazing essays on race, moral complicity, and a storyteller’s responsibility to the truth ... Coates exhorts readers, including students, parents, educators, and journalists, to challenge conventional narratives that can be used to justify ethnic cleansing or camouflage racist policing. Brilliant and timely.
