→ April 9, 2023
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The Trees.

Percival Everett has been publishing novels since the mid-1980s, but the 66-year-old author has come into much greater critical acclaim with his three most recent works, becoming a Pulitzer finalist for 2021’s Telephone, a Booker finalist for 2022’s The Trees, and, so far, already a finalist for the NBCC Fiction award for Dr. No. I’d never read any of his work before The Trees, which I read on my flight to Phoenix and enjoyed so much that I went to Changing Hands that same day and bought Dr. No. The Trees is a massive fake-out of a novel, starting out as a bawdy, neo-noir sort of detective novel, before taking a sudden turn into more serious and philosophical territory, resolving the question of the crime in the least satisfying way possible – because that was never the point.

A couple of white men are found brutally murdered in the minuscule, backwards town of Money, Mississippi, a town only known for being the site of the murder of Emmett Till. In each case, they’ve been castrated, with their genitalia in the fist of a Black man’s corpse found in the same room. And each time, it’s the same Black man’s corpse. It goes from the morgue to the next murder scene, making a mockery of the local authorities, who did not need the help. Two Black detectives from the Mississippi Bureau of Investigations show up to try to solve the murders, which doesn’t go over well with the white cops in Money or even the victims’ families, although the assistance the two receive from some of the Black residents is only slightly better. The victims turn out to have a surprising connection, and just as the MBI agents and the FBI agent assigned to help them have started to put this together, reports come in of nearly identical crimes in Chicago, Los Angeles, and elsewhere.

The Trees is part dark comedy, part revenge fantasy, part detective story (at least at the start), but it is entirely a story about the weight of history. The systemic racism that pervades the entire history of the United States is reflected in the murders, the authorities, the investigation, almost every aspect of The Trees. It’s in the banter – much of it very, very funny – between the two MBI agents, who absolutely could have stepped out of The Wire. It’s in the diner where Gertrude, a fair-skinned woman who lives in Money, works as a waitress, often serving white people who conveniently forget that she’s Black. It’s practically woven into the pages of the book.

While the novel doesn’t have the same psychological horror element as Get Out, it mines very similar thematic territory, combining it with the sort of over-the-top humor that made Paul Beatty’s The Sellout such a critical success. There’s a seething rage beneath the surface here that Everett holds in check with the various layers of humor, especially with the MBI agents Jim Davis and Ed Morgan, who combine the “old married couple” vibe of McNulty and Bunk with wry commentary on the dangers of their situation as two Black feds in a town that has is still debating whether to acknowledge the advent of Reconstruction. (These two characters could have their own TV series, although doing so would strip out the theme of historical racism that underlies the novel, and I think the novel is unfilmable given its somewhat ambiguous ending.) It’s a delicate balance to strike, and Everett never seems to waver, mixing in humor highbrow and low, even throwing in some ridiculous character names like Cad Fondle or Herberta Hind, to allow him to escalate the extent and violence of the crimes at the narrative’s heart without turning the reader away.

Where The Trees ends may frustrate you if you need a firm conclusion that wraps up all of a novel’s loose ends, as Everett does very little of that. You’ll know who’s responsible for the murders, but beyond that, he offers little resolution and far more doubt than is conventional for any novel, let alone one that at least draws on the traditions of the detective genre. It’s in service of the book’s larger themes of historical racism and the double-edged sword of vengeance. Your mileage may vary, of course. I found myself so drawn in by the humor and the tight prose that I was willing to follow The Trees wherever it led me.

Next up: Elizabeth McCracken’s The Hero of this Book.

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→ January 25, 2023
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Blacktop Wasteland.

S.A. Cosby’s 2020 novel Blacktop Wasteland takes the one-last-job gimmick into the back woods of North Carolina, where Beauregard “Bug” Montage, a getaway driver of exceptional skill who has since retired from the larceny game, finds his legitimate business threatened with bankruptcy if he can’t come up with $20,000. Coincidentally, a thief who cost him a huge payout the last time they worked together shows up with the promise of a six-figure score if Bug will drive him and a buddy to knock over a jewelry store in Virginia. Needless to say, the job does not go as planned, leading to a high body count and a mostly predictable ride down the highways and back roads as Bug tries to save himself, his family, and maybe his business too.

Bug’s life is not conducive to being a getaway driver, as he’s now living with his wife and two kids, while he has at least one daughter from a previous relationship, and takes some care of her because her mother is an addict. This, of course, leads to some fairly obvious complications, where anyone involved in the heist gone wrong can threaten not just Bug but any members of his family. His garage is failing because one of his many nemeses in their small town has opened up another, new garage and siphoned off a large portion of his customers – but that garage conveniently burns down, and its racist white owners decide to pay Bug (who is Black) a visit. And the planning of the heist itself turns out to be less than ironclad, as what Bug’s confederates are stealing belongs to someone else who will be very unhappy to see it lost, while the two men he’s working with turn out to be less than worthy of his trust.

It’s a lot, and I don’t mean that in a good way; it feels like Cosby is artificially ratcheting up the stakes as much as he can to produce a specific level of high tension and a dire situation for Bug to escape. While the plot itself isn’t predictable, the plot’s destination is. There’s only one way this can all end, really, and you can paint in broad strokes how Cosby is going to get us there, and who’s likely to be left standing when the story ends.

That’s not to say Blacktop Wasteland is boring – it is tense, and sometimes exciting, and never slow. There’s one particular car chase that is about as well-written as I’ve seen, where Cosby translates the speed of the chase and Bug’s dexterity behind the wheel into prose without breaking the spell of the scene with extraneous descriptions. I’m not a car guy, but Cosby seems well-versed in engines and what cars might be capable of doing in the hands of someone like Bug, who is both expert driver and mechanic. I’m also not immune to the type of narrative greed created by a plot where one man is targeted by just about everyone else in the story except for his own family; Cosby pulls the rubber band as far as it can possibly go without breaking, and when he lets it go, it’s effective, even if you can guess the general outline of things to come.

In the end, however, Blacktop Wasteland felt too familiar, and in some ways too derivative of other heist novels, such as the Parker novels from Richard Stark (a pen name of Donald Westlake). Cosby may have been trying to touch on some larger themes here, especially of race, but if so, it doesn’t achieve that goal – there’s only the story itself, which is enough to sustain the read but not enough to recommend it.

Next up: P. Djèlí Clark’s A Master of Djinn, winner of last year’s Nebula Award for Best Novel.

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→ May 9, 2022
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The Love Songs of W.E.B. Du Bois.

Honorée Fannone Jeffers’ debut novel The Love Songs of W.E.B. Du Bois is one of the best 21st century books I’ve read, an epic work of historical and contemporary fiction full of three-dimensional characters, evocative places, and an exploration of how personal and generational trauma echoes through years and family trees. Winner of this year’s National Book Critics’ Circle Award for Fiction, it’s an actual heartbreaking work of staggering genius.

The novel follows two stories in the same family line, focusing on Ailey Pearl Garfield, who is three years old when the novel opens and a graduate student by the time it closes. She’s one of three sisters born into a well-off Black family in an unnamed northern city, but whose roots are in Chicasetta, a small town in rural Georgia that, as we learn over the course of the novel, went from Creek territory to slave plantation to village, with Ailey’s ancestors there throughout. Her narrative follows the traumas of her modern family, especially those of her sister, Lydia, and herself, as we learn early in the novel that both were molested by their grandfather over a period of several years.

Their ancestry traces back to the Creek people who originally lived on that land until white colonoists tricked them out of it, eventually kicking them off the land and building a brutal cotton plantation there. The primary slave owner, Samuel Princhard, was especially vile and his crimes seem to pass through subsequent generations like a genetic inheritance, although eventually some of the slaves escape the plantation and create new lives for themselves after the Civil War. Ailey’s connection to her ancestors runs through three aged relatives still living in Chicasetta, especially her great-uncle Root, a former academic and expert on Black history who loves to debate the relative merits of W.E.B. Du Bois and Booker T. Washington. When Ailey makes her meandering way to graduate school, after an abortive attempt at pre-med to follow in her father’s and her oldest sister’s footsteps, it is Uncle Root who both opens doors for her in a predominantly white world and who coaches her through the worst moments. Along the way, characters die, come in and out of Ailey’s life, and dredge up old memories, all of which collides when Ailey’s research into her own lineage as part of her dissertation runs headlong into Princhard’s story and the many people who lived, worked, and died on that plantation.

The Love Songs of W.E.B. Du Bois runs to nearly 800 pages, but Dr. Jeffers has created an immersive world – two of them, really – where, for me at least, the reader is as close to the scenes as possible. Few writers can evoke images and create characters this real and solid, let alone in a debut novel. Ailey and Uncle Root are the standouts, but they’re just the head of a wide cast, and even many of the secondary characters are still memorable and move beyond stock status. Jeffers also weaves a discussion of intersectionality throughout the book, mostly that of Black feminism and the roles of women in Black American society as well as in American society at large – and yes, the phenomenon of white women leaving Black women behind in their fight for rights appears several times, including in probably the weakest character in the book, Rebecca, who only appears briefly near the end.

The historical passages in Chicasetta, on the plantation and before the white settlers seized the land, have the same gauzy feel of some of the great works of Black American literature set in that time period, including Beloved, with elements of magical realism at play. Jeffers centers the slaves in the story, treating the brutality of their lives as a matter of fact, which I found increased the horror of it – this was just an accepted part of their reality, living under a capricious, vengeful god in human form. She still does give time to the slaveowning family, but that’s because telling their story becomes a critical part of telling Ailey’s.

Ailey herself is a beautifully flawed, realistic character, often exasperating in her choices or even words but ultimately the hero of the work – and the hero of her family, the one who doesn’t just survive her trials but steps forward to reclaim the family’s legacy and take it forward for future generations. I imagine someone will try to turn The Love Songs of W.E.B. Du Bois into a movie, but this book has the rich storytelling of the best narrative television series we’ve seen. It deserves the longer treatment, or none at all. And of the candidates I’ve read for this year’s Pulitzer Prize for Fiction – which includes the very good Hell of a Book, by Jason Mott, winner of the National Book Award – this is by far my favorite.

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→ November 15, 2021
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Passing.

Nella Larsen’s 1929 novella Passing had, somehow, never been adapted for the screen until this year, despite decades of acclaim – Penguin included it in their Classics series, and LitHub named it one of the 50 best short novels published before 1970 – and themes of race and identity that have lost nothing in relevance since the novel’s publication. Rebecca Hall, star of 2018’s Christine, took on the task of both writing the screenplay and directing the film, producing a highly faithful version of Larsen’s original story that preserves the original’s ambiguity and incisive eye on its main characters.

The novel and film focus on two Black women, Irene (Tessa Thompson) and Clare (Ruth Negga), who were friends in childhood but drifted apart at some point afterwards, only to stumble upon each other in Manhattan one day – in a tea room where both women are “passing” as white. Irene learns that Clare has been passing for years, to the point of marrying a white man who has no idea of her racial background, and that as part of the ruse, Clare puts on a show of hating all Black people – even more so than her husband does. Irene has married a successful doctor (Andre Holland), living in Harlem with their two boys, and is very involved in the Negro Women’s League – a cause to which Clare seems to attach herself, at least as far as attending the social events where she can slide back and forth between her two identities. When Clare becomes closer to Irene’s husband, who is happy to pay her some attention, Irene starts to doubt her friend’s motives, and a coincidental meeting puts them all on the inevitable collision course with the truth.

Hall’s script hews almost completely to Larsen’s original story, down to the characters and settings, a sensible choice given the strength of the original material – especially the characterization of Clare, who might have less screen time than Irene but is the most interesting character by far, as she dances with danger by trying to live in both worlds at the same time. Negga has to be headed for awards nominations with this performance, where she takes the heedless Clare of the book and makes her more subtle, daring with the chances she takes but more sympathetic as she hints at the ways in which she’s trapped herself by passing to this extent. Is she flirting with Irene’s husband, or does she just enjoy the attention of men other than the husband she secretly loathes? (Is he flirting back, or just being chivalrous?) The two women both appear to envy what the other has; Clare is the life of the party, and has access to a whole world that is closed to Irene, while Irene never has the stress of passing, and does not have to deny her identity, or give up her family and friends to have material wealth. Both actresses portray this exquisitely, through tone and expression as well as Hall’s dialogue. Negga in particular could strip paint off the walls just through a change in how she looks at another character, while Thompson’s portrayal of Irene is understated because of the way that character keeps her mistrust and rage bottled up.

Hall shot the film in black and white, which certainly helps evoke the 1920s (pre-Crash) setting, but also creates additional ambiguity around the varying skin tones of the main characters. If you had never seen Thompson or Negga before Passing, you might not immediately know either woman was Black. (Negga is part Ethiopian and part Irish, and has been vocal about her identification with and interest in Black history.) Negga’s hair is dyed blonde, further developing her racial ambiguity and making it easier to see how she might slide back and forth between the white world of midtown Manhattan – and her racist husband – and Irene’s world of Harlem. It is as un-showy a directorial effort as you might find, especially for someone’s debut in that chair, but that makes it all the more remarkable, and one I hope is fully recognized by critics and awards shows.

I’ve only seen two movies that are awards contenders for 2021, this and In the Heights, so saying this is one of the best things I’ve seen all year seems rather disingenuous, but I feel confident I won’t see five better movies than Passing in this cycle. It’s so well-written and well-acted, and it is the type of movie I especially enjoy. Passing has a leisurely rhythm that contrasts the seriousness of its subject matter in such a way that the conclusion packs the maximum possible punch, and even though I knew what was coming, I still felt the full impact because Hall and her two leads set it up so well.

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→ October 27, 2021
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Homegoing.

My daughter had to read Yaa Gyasi’s acclaimed debut novel Homegoing for her 9th grade English class, reporting that she thought it was extremely well-written, just sad. I tend to enjoy post-colonial literature, so I thought I’d give it a shot, further encouraged by the fact that the novel had won the PEN/Hemingway Award.

The novel is a sequence of fourteen connected short stories that follow the descendants of two Asante half-sisters, one of whom was sold into slavery, the other married to an English colonizer, down to the present day, by which point both lineages are in the United States. What happens from there isn’t as simple as you’d expect – this isn’t Sliding Doors, where everything is great in one set of stories and awful in the others – as Gyasi builds a new character in every chapter, developing them as independent people but also recognizing how history would define not just their circumstances but their personalities as well. The stories move through several centuries of history, from the way contact with Europeans tore apart the Gold Coast to how slavery and Jim Crow laws continue to limit Black Americans’ economic opportunities.

Even as the setting shifts from present-day Ghana to the U.S., the shadow of colonization obscures everything that happens in Homegoing. The course of history was changed when white people showed up in Africa and decided it was theirs – the land, the resources, and even the people – and the ramifications echo down through seven generations in this novel. Gyasi doesn’t deny her characters free will, but we are all shaped by our circumstances, and her characters’ circumstances build on themselves like a matryoshka, so that the characters in our present day, who would appear to have more freedom and more opportunity, are still weighed down by the centuries of oppression that preceded them.

I can also see why my daughter wouldn’t love the stories in this book, as most are grim, many are violent, and few offer much hope. There’s some graphic content in here, including rape and sexual assault, enough that I assume many schools wouldn’t assign it, but it’s almost certainly an accurate depiction of the way the English treated the Asante natives, and later enslaved, and of course the way American slaveowners treated their slaves.

Where Gyasi excels is in her ability to create one interesting character after another, despite only giving us a short time with each of them and also working with the constraints of the previous story in each chain (and, I presume, the subsequent stories as well). It’s an impressive feat of imagination within the confines of the novel’s structure, marking her as someone who is as deft with the short form as well as the longer.

It’s also why I’m not talking much about the individual characters and stories – they’re so short that I don’t want to spoil too much of them. Esi is the half-sister who is enslaved, then raped by a British officer; her daughter, born of that assault, grows up a slave in the American south, and manages to send her baby with an escaping slave to freedom in Baltimore, starting a chain of misery that moves back into the deep south and then to New York, with racism, further violence, forced labor, and more. Effia marries the Governor of the slave castle where, unbeknownst to her, her half-sister Esi is held in the dungeon below. Their child, Quey, is ill at ease in the white man’s world and returns to his Asante people, beginning a back-and-forth pattern between the Black and white cultures in east Africa until the final story sees their descendant in Alabama, where the two stories will eventually reconnect. It’s a masterwork of planning, with the parallel narratives coming together in a way that is driven by coincidence yet feels natural, almost inevitable, and that will never have you thinking how meticulous the novel’s structure is.

Next up: I’m reading some of the books on writing that you all recommended, having finished Anne Lamott’s Bird by Bird and started Verlyn Klinkenborg’s Several Short Sentences about Writing.

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→ October 7, 2021
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Harlem Shuffle.

Colson Whitehead’s last two novels, The Underground Railroad and The Nickel Boys, both won the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction, making him the first Black author to win that prize twice. Both were serious novels, the first with fantastical elements to try to tell a familiar story in a new way, the latter more straightforward, but neither presaged what he’s done in his latest novel, Harlem Shuffle, which is funnier, more action-packed, and just generally more entertaining.

Harlem Shuffle is the story of two men in that part of Manhattan in the early 1960s. Raymond, the son of a crook who has become an entrepreneur, owns a furniture store in Harlem that caters to the customers the white-owned stores downtown won’t serve. Freddie, his ne’er-do-well cousin, has been getting Ray in trouble since they were kids, and this time, he lands Ray smack in the middle of a heist that has half of Harlem looking for them, and involves Ray with the kind of people he never wanted to be involved with – the people with whom his father did jobs, that is. When a mobster’s goons show up at the store, and a crooked cop does too, things go pear-shaped for the cousins, leaving Raymond to try to find a way to clean up the mess and protect his family. Meanwhile, Ray’s situation at home is always tenuous. He needs a bigger house for his growing family, while his in-laws continue to look down on him as the son of a crook, which makes him not good enough for their daughter. He’s already conflicted about taking any money from Freddie’s shenanigans, but now anything he gets from the big score would help him move to a better place … while also risking further scorn from his in-laws and even the trust of his wife.

My experience with Whitehead is limited to the two novels that won him the Pulitzer, both of which were weighted down with heavy themes and only lightened by Whitehead’s remarkable prose and rich characterization. Here, Whitehead gets to have some fun, even though there are undercurrents of violence, internecine warfare in Harlem’s Black community, white cops assaulting Black citizens (including the real Harlem riots of 1964, which occur right around Ray’s store and shut down much of the commerce on which he depends), and more. There’s also a subtle theme of the growing divide within the Black community between the upwardly mobile and those still held down by the extensive obstacles of the time and the history of oppression that still limits Black Americans’ economic opportunities today.

I’ve seen media coverage of Harlem Shuffle that makes it sound like a heist novel – possibly pushed by the publisher – but it’s more heist-adjacent, since Ray doesn’t participate in the heist itself, just in the misadventures that follow when you steal something that a very powerful and violent person would not want to have stolen. Whitehead adapts one of the best aspects of the heist genre, or just the hard-boiled crime genre in general – the array of eccentric and often funny side characters that populate many of those novels. A thief named Pepper who worked with Ray’s dad turns out to be a pivotal character as the novel progresses. Miami Joe is one of the main antagonists in the first part of the novel. Chet the Vet is so-called because he went to vet school for all of a month before turning to crime. Between these fun, if only morally compromised, side characters and Whitehead’s ability to shift between the highbrow prose of his award-winning novels and the vernacular of his 1960s setting, Harlem Shuffle was a blast to read, perhaps an entrée into his work for folks who want to start with some lighter fare before reading his two more serious books.

Next up: David Ewalt’s Of Dice and Men, recommended to me by Foxing lead singer/songwriter (and longtime D&D player) Connor Murphy.

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→ June 4, 2021
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The Vanishing Half.

Brit Bennett has popped up as a favorite to win the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction, to be announced next Friday, June 11th, for her second novel, The Vanishing Half, which HBO is already planning to adapt into a limited series. It is a fascinating work about “passing,” where lighter-skinned Black people pass as white (itself the subject of a novel, Nella Larsen’s Passing, that will appear on the big screen later this year), but with multiple dimensions of intersectionality as well, exploring what happens when two twins take divergent paths because one passes and the other does not.

Desiree and Stella Vignes are identical twins who live in a peculiar town outside of New Orleans called Mallard, a Black enclave where all the residents have relatively light skin – to the point that Mallard looks down on Black people with darker skin tones in many of the ways that you might associate with subtle white racism, even though Mallard residents themselves face racism subtle and unsubtle from white people from surrounding towns. That touches the girls’ lives when they’re seven years old and white men lynch their father as they watch, hiding with their mother, the devastation of which leads indirectly to their decision to run away from home as teenagers. They move to New Orleans, barely able to take care of themselves at first, but eventually settle into menial jobs, one of which comes to Stella because she can pass as a white woman, and the hiring person doesn’t even consider that she might be Black. Stella becomes the vanishing twin of the book’s title, leaving New Orleans without giving her sister any warning, leaving no trace of herself and cutting off any contact with her remaining family. The novel traces their two paths, and how each has one child, a daughter, the two of whom will eventually come into coincidental contact in California, forcing both Vignes sisters to confront their pasts, both shared and separate.

For a novel that isn’t very long – 343 pages, and a brief read for that length – The Vanishing Half has a lot to unpack, starting, of course, with its core examination of race and identity. Race is a social construct, and Bennett uses that as a launching point for the very unparallel lives first of the Vignes sisters, who find themselves in very different circumstances as they move into adulthood, and then their daughters, two cousins who come back together as if driven there by fate. (How Desiree’s daughter, Jude, first encounters and recognizes the aunt she’d never met requires some suspension of disbelief.) The interplay between race, identity – can you be who you are if you shed the race society first thrust upon you? – and later social status is the clear strength of the book, but it becomes muddled in places as Bennett’s approach becomes more intersectional, bringing in additional characters who are well-developed for secondary players but who aren’t additive to the main story. The narrative is more potent when she’s using the two sisters’ stories to explore different aspects of race and racism in the United States in the 1970s and 1980s, which seems like the most likely argument for this book to win the Pulitzer.

Of the two main characters, Desiree seems the more developed, although there might be some primacy bias at work there – we get a few chapters of her story before we meet Stella at all. It’s also likely that Bennett left Stella more inscrutable by design, the “star” who is always just far enough away to remain somewhat impossible to truly know. Desiree’s daughter, Jude, shares a name with the Biblical figure who wrote about how God would punish false prophets, those who preached in his name without his truth, imploring the faithful to stand up for their beliefs – which she does, pursuing Stella and Stella’s daughter Kennedy with the tenacity of a true believer. As the twins fade into the background, it’s Jude who emerges as the novel’s most complete and compelling character, dealing with the consequences of both sisters’ choices in life, and a society that imposes such a cost on Blackness that her aunt chose passing – and giving up her sister, her mother, and her own identity – rather than continue to pay.

Next up: My friend Will Leitch’s first novel, How Lucky.

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→ January 11, 2021
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Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom.

The movie adaptation of August Wilson’s play Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom (on Netflix) has been overshadowed by the death of one of its two stars, Chadwick Boseman, last August, making this his final film appearance. The command performance he gives here is a mournful reminder of how talented he was, and the stardom he had right in front of him, as he even manages to outshine Viola Davis, who’s already won one Oscar and is going to be nominated for another one for playing the title character here.

Ma Rainey was a real-life blues singer, sometimes called the “Mother of the Blues,” who achieved not just popularity but a measure of autonomy for herself in the 1920s, even writing some of her own songs and recording as early as 1923. The black bottom was a dance, and “Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom” was one of her singles – although I’m sure the double entendre wasn’t lost on audiences at the time. The film just covers the time of one recording session for that song, a fictional rendering of the day that revolves around Rainey and a talented, ambitious, and volatile trumpet player named Levee, played by Boseman.

This Rainey, at least, is a diva, demanding of her musicians and the producer alike, insisting that her nephew voice the introduction to the song, even though he has a stutter that makes the task a bit difficult. Levee, meanwhile, has dreams beyond merely playing trumpet in someone else’s band; he writes his own music, has put together his own band, and is busy trying to convince the (white) producer to pay for him to record his songs himself.

Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom, like Fences, comes across like a play on screen, with all the action taking place in just a few settings, and dialogue that never stops. The actors have to convey far more than in a typical film, but they also run the risk of overpowering it, which was the main issue I had with Denzel Washington’s performance in Fences – he dominated every scene he had without Viola Davis, and it took an Oscar-winning performance out of her just to compete.

Here, Boseman and Davis don’t share a ton of scenes, so each can take over in their own way, but neither crosses that line that made me leave the theater thinking Denzel Washington had been yelling at me for an hour and a half. Although Davis’ character is in the title, Levee is the bigger character within the film, getting – in my impression, at least – more screen time and more words than Ma Rainey does. Boseman infuses Levee with both the naked ambition of his character and the innocence required to make his decisions plausible. Levee doesn’t understand how the world works, believing in some level in a meritocracy that doesn’t exist in a world that is already predisposed against him because of the color of his skin. It requires a precise performance to ensure that this character doesn’t become ridiculous. Levee is not a fool, but he’s arrogant enough to think he’s the exception, and when the world doesn’t conform to his beliefs, the cognitive dissonance causes him to erupt in unexpected violence.

Boseman is going to win the Oscar, of course, because of his tragic death before the movie was even released, but there won’t be a plausible argument that the performance itself was undeserving. He puts Levee on a knife’s edge and holds him there for the bulk of the film, so that when he breaks, as you know he must, it works, because you’ve been waiting for him to explode. It makes Davis’ performance seem showy by comparison, although she also is likely to get (and deserve) a nomination for this role.

The story here is somewhat scant, although that seems typical of stage adaptations to screen, and Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom adheres to the play’s use of just a few settings, with the bulk of the film taking place in the recording studio or in the musicians’ room below it. That also means we don’t have much time for back story, and outside of the two main characters, everyone is pretty one-dimensional. The producer who takes Levee’s songs and promises to look them over might be well founded in history, but he’s nothing but a penny-pinching, greedy white man taking advantage of Levee’s race and ignorance here, bordering on a dangerous stereotype. (It’s worth noting, however, that Wilson and this script both changed one word of the lyrics to “Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom,” here substituting “new baby prances” for “Jew baby prances.”)

Levee’s big speech towards the end of the film broaches questions about being Black in a society that has always treated Blacks as second-class citizens when treating them as citizens at all, and even goes beyond that to an existential question about Blacks and a God who seems to have forsaken them. It is the clip I expect we’ll see when Boseman’s name is announced at the Oscars in April, because it is his biggest moment and the best pure writing in the script. I imagine this will earn a Best Picture nomination as well, but the reason to watch Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom is for Boseman’s performance – not because he’s gone, but because he’s just that good.

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→ October 23, 2020
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Mumbo Jumbo.

I can’t believe Ishmael Reed’s 1972 Mumbo Jumbo escaped my notice until just this year, when I grabbed it for $2 for the Kindle. It would have fit perfectly in the class I took in college called Comedy and the Novel – which, as great as it was, did not include a single book written by a woman or a person of color – and should be in high school curricula around the country. It’s postmodern yet largely accessible; it’s funny, yet incredibly serious; and it deals with timeless topics of race and culture. It’s also about a nonlethal pandemic, making it an interesting read in the time of COVID-19. There were certainly parts I didn’t follow, some of which is a function of my cultural illiteracy, but the end result is an important and very compelling work of magical realism and postmodern fiction.

The pandemic at the heart of this story is called “Jes Grew,” and the primary symptom is the desire to dance and have fun. Needless to say, the white powers that be can’t abide this, and the Knights of Templar (who still exist) team up with the shadowy Wallflower Order to fight it, while various Black leaders, many of whom are voodoo clergy, work against them. The story twists and turns while incorporating major historical events from the first half of the twentieth century, placing great emphasis on the 19-year U.S. occupation of Haiti, with appearances by a cornucopia of real-life figures, including President Warren Harding, dancer/author Irene Castle, and W.E.B. Dubois.

In the world of Mumbo Jumbo, voodoo is real, but its history has been suppressed by white people (as have many elements of Black culture), and the true history of Judeo-Christian religions is quite different from the one we’re given today, involving a gallimaufry of spirits and prophets going back to ancient Egypt. The voodoo priests are led by PaPa LaBas, a voudou priest who is named for one of that religion’s spirits known as loas, but the characters themselves are secondary to the “anti-plague” of Jes Grew, a fairly obvious metaphor for the spread of Black culture and white efforts to stop it and, when they can’t, their efforts to appropriate and assimilate it. The story winds through jazz clubs and speakeasies, including Harlem’s famous Cotton Club, and art museums housing stolen art from the developing world. It works in the search for a mystical text from the goddess Osiris that may explain the origins of Jes Grew and hold the key to stopping it. Reed even works in the since-debunked story that Harding was part Black.

There’s plenty of intrigue here, including several murders by the warring factions, a demonic possession, and a tense hostage scene, which was more than enough to hold my interest for its scant 200 pages (and something like 50 chapters). There’s a lot of subtext here that I know I missed, though, from Black cultural history to voodoo and spiritualism, caused by gaps in my own education, that I’m sure limited how much I could understand and appreciate what was going on in Mumbo Jumbo. I understood his points about Black culture and the long history of white attempts to suppress it, probably because I’m at least old enough to remember mainstream resistance to rap music – and more than one adult telling me in the late 1980s that rap was “a fad” that wouldn’t last – and how it was characterized. The levers of power in the entertainment world are still controlled by white people, mostly white men, which is why Tyler Perry had to finance his own productions, and why some people of color have to produce and direct films in which they star. That’s part of why I said Mumbo Jumbo should be taught in schools – that aspect of the book is still extremely relevant – although I think this is also a text that would reward the closer reading of an academic setting, with guidance on some of the book’s allusions that I probably missed. It was rewarding enough as is, but I think reading it in a class would be even more so.

Next up: I just finished Graham Swift’s new novel Here We Are and am about halfway through Dr. Alan Kazdin’s The Everyday Parenting Toolkit.

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→ May 7, 2020
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The Parable of the Sower.

I’ve read a lot of science fiction authors, including at least one book by every winner of the Hugo for Best Novel, but had never read anything by Octavia Butler until I read The Parable of the Sower last month. Butler, the most prominent woman of color in sci-fi and a direct inspiration for the highly decorated author N.K. Jemisin, was the first science fiction writer to win a MacArthur “genius” grant, and published 14 novels in her career before her untimely death at age 58 in 2006.

One thing often absent from science fiction novels and short stories, especially those written in the first few decades of the genre, are realistic women characters, something that inspired Butler to start writing her own stories. The Parable of the Sower is narrated by a young woman of color named Lauren who is a “sharer,” born with a condition called hyperempathy syndrome, so when she sees anyone else suffering physical pain she’s hit with the same pain even though she didn’t suffer the injury.

Set in the United States in the 2020s in a post-capitalist collapse that seems like it might have inspired the Purge movies, The Parable of the Sower follows Lauren from her poor but protected compound in southern California on her flight north while she develops her belief system, which she calls “Earthseed.” Her father is a pastor, which is a rare source of guaranteed income in this dystopian economy, but she finds herself unable to believe in his traditional Christian religion, or even in its conception of God, instead writing down verses and descriptions of humans as Earthseed, driving towards a heaven in the stars where man colonizes new planets now that he’s destroyed this one.

The Parable of the Sower is grim and unflinching, especially in its depiction of women as an oppressed underclass in this still-patriarchal facsimile of a society. If you leave the protection of the compound where Lauren and her family live, you put your life at risk; if you do so as a woman, especially alone, you are extremely likely to be sexually assaulted, and Lauren sees multiple women who appear to have been victims of brutal rapes whenever she heads outside of the commune’s walls. In a world where so many people have too little to eat, and very little to lose, and the police are worse than useless, theft is almost expected, and everyone is armed to protect themselves and their property. Butler also adds the wrinkle of a new drug, nicknamed ‘pyro,’ that causes addicts to light fires so they can be mesmerized by watching the flames. This isn’t our world today, but Butler’s prescient writing about the impacts of increased income inequality and food insecurity on top of a country already armed to its teeth feels a lot more possible right now than it would have when she wrote it in 1993 – even before you layer on a global pandemic and the rise of an entire political movement ready to discard tens of thousands of citizens just to goose the stock market.

The Earthseed belief system, which revolves around the idea that God is change and holds that man’s destiny is to colonize the stars, gets some treatment within this book, but the specific tenets are less important than Lauren’s development of the system, and how she uses it to try to build a fledgling community around herself while in flight to northern California. The core idea of Earthseed that God is malleable, and humanity can shape God, conflicts on some level with its idea that God shapes the universe, which I assume Butler would continue to address in the sequel (The Parable of the Talents); even within this book, Lauren is challenged by the people in her ragtag band of followers, who range from ardent skeptics to curious adherents, to explain this and other paradoxes – or even explain why anyone should believe at all in the face of such widespread misery and existential dread.

I read Rivers Solomon’s An Unkindness of Ghosts about a year and a half ago, and was constantly reminded of that book, which also has a young female protagonist struggling against multiple levels of oppression in a dystopian environment, while reading Parable; searching now, I see multiple references to Solomon and their novel as a ‘successor’ to Butler’s work. The connections are undeniable, but it also seems like a reminder that voices like theirs and Jemisin’s remain uncommon in the worlds of science fiction and fantasy writing, and thus these themes of sexism, racism, inequality, and othering are also underrepresented, even as they become so much more prevalent in mainstream literature (e.g., with Colson Whitehead winning two of the last four Pulitzer Prizes for Fiction with novels about race and racism). Butler also wrote with a gritty, unflinching realism that existed in that era but was, at least, outside the more genteel strains of sci-fi that won awards and garnered more attention, a style that probably put her twenty years ahead of her time. It’s a particular shame that she died so young when, if she were alive today, she’d have seen her influence spread so far, and have seen the world of science fiction expand to include voices and styles like hers become not just accepted, but lauded.

Next up: Still reading 24: Life Stories and Lessons from the Say Hey Kid, by Willie Mays and John Shea. John will be on my podcast next week to talk about the book.

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