A brutal American epic and a painful family saga mostly set in Georgia, The Love Songs of W.E.B. Du Bois is mostly set in the present but a present that is haunted by and still suffers from the crimes of the past. It centers around Ailey Pearl Garfield, the youngest child of a doctor and a teacher, as she comes of age in the 1970s and 1980s, goes from a mostly Black public school to a white private school and then to a fictional HBCU named Routledge before going on to graduate school in history. This might sound like a simple path but it is anything but as she has to traverse serious problems in her own immediate family, sexual violence, doubts and confusion, racism and colorism, and more. The book also zooms in to the perspective of her mother for a section and her oldest sister for another section (the book is already long at 800 pages but I would have welcomed another 50-100 pages if we could have gotten the perspective of her middle sister who we get bits and pieces about but never anything very fleshed out).

The narrative from the 1960s to 2007 takes up most of the book but it is interspersed with lengthy sections called "songs" set in the 18th and 19th century about the tangled history of violence, dispossession, treachery and slavery that was the origin of Ailey's family. It begins with the melding of African, Indian and white and then mostly centers around a brutal but savvy white slaveowner and the lives of the enslaved people on his plantation. The songs get complicated with a lot of names, relationships, and I found myself frequently turning to the genealogical table at the beginning of the book but also reconciling myself to not following every twist and turn of these historical characters and comforting myself with the notion that maybe part of the point was that it was all tangled up in every shade from black to white.

In some ways the novel is elegantly constructed with the past coming back to the present as Ailey becomes a historian and starts discovering it for herself. In other ways it seems inelegant, bulging in strange places, jumping around in ways that are not completely clear, and then leaving loose ends in others. Moreover, as is inevitable, some of the characters feel more like stereotypes, perhaps the crudest being a white woman who goes to graduate school with Ailey and is depicted as a simplistic and stupid racist, albeit one married to a Black man--a fact that, by itself, merited fleshing her out more than Honorée Fanonne Jeffers did.

Some of the reviews described this as the best book of the decade or longer, I found the best of it among the best of the decade but also a certain amount of unevenness that left me thinking it was extraordinary, large swaths were mesmerizing, but I still don't feel myself needing to tell everyone that they must immediately read it. That said, you probably should.