I read Fanny Howe's "Saving History" over the weekend. I was interested by the unstable racial identity of the characters. She provides info about ancestry, skin color, etc... in a gradual way, so that the reader only arrives at a specific racial "definition" through a prolonged process. The white character, Temple, on the other hand, is first introduced as simply "a white man"; there is no ambiguity at all in this case. The subject matter of the novel seems to shift as well, or at least my sense of what it was about. It is not digressive, really, but rather information rich: new dimensions are revealed on each page.