Review: The Accommodation (2021)
The story surrounding The Accommodation is almost as interesting as the book itself. Originally published in the 1980s, it's a journalistic account of Dallas’s racial politics and how the city’s treatment of black people since the Civil War differs from that of other major cities. But on the eve of its release, the book’s original publisher dropped it. (The author, Jim Schutze, has said the publisher faced backlash from the perception that The Accommodation was ‘anti-Dallas.’) It was picked up by another publisher but then vanished into near obscurity for decades until Deep Vellum republished it in 2021.
Clearly, The Accommodation has a lot of historical significance. And I think everyone in North Texas should read it, even if they’re not specifically interested in Dallas history. There's a lot that’s still relevant to the present: The racist terrorism that Schutze chronicles – the book devotes a lot of space to documenting bombings that white citizens carried out against black homeowners – needs to be much closer to the center of the stories Dallas tells about itself, rather than shoved to the periphery.
That said, the book itself is a real mess.
Though the narrative is vaguely chronological, there is no structure, and Schutze’s presentation of often fascinating, sometimes chilling historical details sometimes feels like a jumbled mess.
It's also somehow both too long and underdeveloped. The book is often unfocused, drifting from its core goal of exploring the politics of race into other subjects, like Dallas’s hysterical anti-communism and the assassination of JFK. But these side narratives never fully connect to Schutze’s main project. At the same time, none of the central characters in Dallas’s history really come into focus either. Schutze seemingly interviewed a lot of the city’s white power brokers and black activists, but most are reduced to talking heads who are quoted at length rather than presented as people with real lives who shaped what Dallas looked like in the 20th century.
Ultimately, The Accommodation felt to me like an important, incomplete piece of history that fails to fully cohere into a book that's actually good.
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