Caryl Phillips has a thing about blackness. As a former student of his once told me: "Everything Caz owns is black. His laptop is black, all his clothes are black. He drove a black Mercedes."

Even in Manhattan, where hepcats and heiresses still cloak themselves in black, this makes Phillips an easy mark. Stepping into Le Monde, a bistro near Columbia University, the 47-year-old novelist arrives in a ripple of blackness. He doesn't simply wear the colour — although he is, of course, dressed in all black — but disappears inside it.

It was Phillips, when he was here earlier in the year for the Writers and Readers week, who rattled Kim Hill when he declined to agree to her proposition that he was angry about racism.

The way blackness can swallow at a man is at the heart of Phillips' latest novel, Dancing in the Dark, a mournful tale about turn-of-the-century stage performer Bert Williams. A gifted pantomime artist who read Goethe in his leisure time, Williams performed in blackface, which meant the West Indian-born star prepared for work by rubbing cork on his already black skin, exaggerating the sweep of his lips with red gloss.

The minstrel face this created appears "ghastly to us today", says Phillips, putting it lightly. But during the early 1900s Williams made a fortune doing it.

He performed on Broadway long before whites were rushing up to Harlem. In fact, he was the highest-paid member of the Ziegfeld Follies.

The Faustian nature of this bargain intrigued Phillips, who has written about race and identity his entire career. "The more I read about him, the more I thought to myself: what on earth was he thinking?" Phillips takes a sip of lemonade and cringes. "I mean, what on earth would make somebody go against the grain — and continue to perform and embrace the mockery of this image?"

Some of the answers can be found in Dancing in the Dark, which turns Williams' life into a three-act of novelettes. The first section describes Williams' journey to the stage. The second introduces his rise to fame, his weakness for drink, his sexless marriage, and the problems that developed with his African-American co-star, George Walker. In the final section, Williams has a short, lonely ride at the top, a stranger to everyone, including himself.

Phillips began his literary career as a playwright, so the rhythms and form of stage life came naturally to him. The trick was inverting the novel's traditional arc toward self-knowledge. "I wanted it to seem as if he was disappearing," says Phillips.

And so as it progresses, Dancing in the Dark gives us less and less access to Williams' inner life. By the end, we are literally in the audience, regarding the mask he has adopted.

Phillips doesn't want the reader to take in this spectacle and judge Williams, but empathise with him. "The tragedy isn't just the reality of the situation at the time. The tragedy is when someone like Williams takes on some of the responsibility for [this compromise] all by themselves."