The Richard Wright Centennial (2008) provides a special opportunity for readers to reconsider salient aspects of Richard Wright’s life (Sept. 4, 1908 — Nov. 28, 1960) and the many angles from which his fiction and non-fiction can still cast light on fundamental issues of the 21st century. In the midst of centennial activities, the pi ce de ré sistance will be the publication of Wright’s last novel, “A Father’s Law,” in January 2008. Written in the final months of his life, this novel invites us to readjust our thinking about Wright’s relentless exploration of the human condition.

Wright’s stories do not permit readers to be indifferent. He demonstrates, in a novel that is slightly more reader-friendly than either “The Outsider” (1953) or “The Long Dream” (1958), why the confluence of psychology, philosophy and criminology is a compelling tactic

“A Father’s Law” dwells less on the specifics of “race” and more on ancient prejudices and legalized mores that frustrate our efforts to act morally, to do the right thing. Wright uses some elements of the detective novel to plot the relationship of Chief of Police Rudolph Turner with his son Tommy, but Wright subverts our expectations. We do not have an average thriller. “A Father’s Law” denies us the pleasure of the time-killing fictions we consume between flights at the airport. This novel requires us to inspect the minds of two characters seemingly caught in the net of law.

As a police chief in Brentwood Park, an upscale Chicago suburb, Rudolph (Ruddy) Turner relishes his achievement. He loves “the laws and rules of the community with an abiding and intense passion.” As a father who is Republican, Catholic and black, he is vulnerable. His badge of authority is a weak shield. He has failed to cultivate bonds of friendship with his 19-year-old son Tommy, although he has been responsible in providing him with material goods and educational advantages. He feels guilty about that failure. His efforts to make amends only beget more doubts. Is his son against him and the bourgeois values for which he stands? Wright’s masterful depiction of Turner’s states of mind and Tommy’s catalytic antagonism leads us into a vortex where explanations of good, evil, guilt, innocence, obedience and fathomless resentment evade us.

For some readers, “A Father’s Law” may appear to be a rewriting of “The Long Dream” insofar as it is about fathers and sons. Nevertheless, the dice are loaded differently in Wright’s last novel.

In “The Long Dream,” the son, Rex “Fishbelly” Tucker, comes to despise his middle-class father’s corruption and sycophancy; he scorns Tyree Tucker’s wearing of a mask in the face of racism and the “white” law’s turning a blind eye on matters of black criminality. Under his father’s tutelage, Rex becomes savvy about the hypocrisies of a segregated world; out of spite, he eschews formal education, embraces “manhood,” and becomes his father’s partner in shady dealings. On the other hand, “A Father’s Law” is set in the “integrated” North. Tommy has stronger intellectual yearnings than Rex, and his life is more sheltered. His father has never taught him the ways of the real world. It is through his readings in psychology and sociology that he develops distrust of his father’s unquestioning belief in the rightness of law. He is ill-equipped, however, to deal with some brutal facts of everyday life.

Given that “A Father’s Law” is replete with echoes from such earlier novels as “Lawd Today!,” “Native Son,” “The Outsider,” and “Savage Holiday,” the novel is a summation of Wright’s aesthetic. We may agree with an insight Julia Wright gives us in her introduction.

“There is eeriness in my father’s premonition,” she writes, “that criminality was doomed to bloom among the elite, that the energies of the Tommies of America might better be used by a cause or a movement for justice, that syphilis would overtake us under another name, and that youth serial killing on American university campuses would eventually inspire a prize-winning film in Cannes”(xi-xii).

What is law? Who is its father? Even in its unfinished state, “A Father’s Law” succeeds in reading mankind’s dirty laundry.

It gives us the option of reading against the patriarchal grain.

Jerry W. Ward Jr. is a Richard Wright Scholar and professor of English at Dillard University in New Orleans.