A History of the African-American People (Proposed) by Strom Thurmond lives up to the absurdity of its name, although I’m not sure if it reaches whatever the goals of its authors, Percival Everett and his colleague James Kincaid, may have had in writing it. It’s an epistolary satire, written entirely in the form of letters and emails between those two, a foppish dandy named Barton Wilkes who works in Sen. Thurmond’s office, an editor at Simon & Schuster and his assistant, and others, as the plot to write the book of the title becomes increasingly convoluted and the behavior of several people involved becomes unhinged.
The aide to Sen. Thurmond, Barton Wilkes, is positively nuts, as I think is clear from the first few pages. He proposes the book to Simon & Schuster, arguing that Sen. Thurmond is uniquely qualified to opine on the subject of Black people in the United States since Civil War, in part because he was alive for pretty much all of that period. Somehow, he gets an editor, Martin Snell, interested in this preposterous proposal, possibly through some acquaintance with Snell’s assistant Juniper, and the project progresses far enough that Everett and Kincaid come in as ghost-writers. The plan is that Wilkes will send them the Senator’s notes and they’ll turn it all into a book somehow. Of course, the Senator’s actual involvement in or awareness of the project becomes an open question, Wilkes and Snell both appear to be perverts, Everett and Kincaid can’t stop sniping at each other, there’s a possibly mobbed-up rival editor at S&S, and somehow Juniper’s sister ends up part of the story, too.
The obvious target of the satire is Thurmond, who was Senator for about 120 years and spent most of that time pushing white nationalist ideas, particularly anything related to segregation. He split off from the Democrats after World War II, running for President in 1948 as a “States Rights Democratic” candidate and carrying four states. (Since then, only one third-party candidate has earned any electoral votes, another racist windbag, George Wallace, in 1968.) The Thurmond in this book is well aware that he’s about to die and wants to both set the record “straight” on his legacy and possibly grease his path into some sort of afterlife. Everett and Kincaid don’t want any part of whitewashing (pun intended) the Senator’s grim history, and it’s not like they’re getting much money from the project either, although it seems to offer some professional benefits to Kincaid within the story. (I wondered if he was even a real person, but he is, and his specialty is on the sexualization of children in Victorian literature and culture.) Thurmond’s an easy target and the two take him down rather efficiently, although they could obviously have spent even more time lampooning him as a sort of Foghorn Leghorn in Nazi garb and discussing the legacy of his legislative initiatives.
What I didn’t understand was all of the frippery around that part. Snell and Wilkes both seem to be sexual predators of a sort, and Juniper spends most of the novel trying not to become the victim of either of them. Juniper then finds himself farmed out to Vendetti, the editor who definitely does not have mob ties, a switch which ends up putting two people in the hospital. It’s not homophobic, and I’m not sure either Snell or Wilkes is ever identified as gay, but the authors seem to play these two men both trying to sleep with another young man for some kind of humor I didn’t exactly get.
In the end, this book also didn’t land for me, just like American Desert, although that had the benefit of a more coherent narrative and more of Everett’s brilliant prose. This book is comical, and has plenty of laughs, but mostly it’s just so unrealistic that you’ll wonder what we’re doing here.
Next up: I just finished my friend Will Leitch’s newest novel, Lloyd McNeil’s Last Ride, and started the last of this year’s Pulitzer Prize for Fiction finalists, Rita Bullwinkel’s Headshot.