→ 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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→ May 5, 2020
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All Our Names.

Dinaw Mengestu is an Ethiopian-American author of three novels, most recently the 2014 book All Our Names, as well as an essayist and literature professor at Bard College. I’d never heard of him prior to seeing that novel of his show up on sale for the Kindle, and bought it on a whim based on the description and what I could find in a quick search about Mengestu himself. It’s a smart, incisive, and very fast-reading novel of alienation and identity that spans two continents and asks us to examine who we really are.

The novel alternates narratives between those titled Isaac and those titled Helen, but both are connected by a man who came from an unnamed central African country to a midwestern U.S. city as a refugee. In the Isaac sections, two young, poor men, one of whom will eventually flee for America, get caught up in a budding revolution that’s stirring around a university campus where the men hang around but can’t afford to be students. In the chapters titled ‘Helen,’ Isaac, the refugee, and the woman who picks him up at the airport begin a complicated love affair – and, since the novel is set in the 1960s or early 1970s, good ol’ American racism is one of those complications, so Isaac ends up facing threats on both ends of his trip.

Mengestu succeeds here by making both stories equally compelling despite their substantive and dramatic differences. The half of the book set in Africa is fraught with danger as the two boys are swept up by events surrounding them, and eventually join forces with one revolutionary group, so that they’re frequently endangering themselves or merely endangered by their mere existence as young men in a newly independent, barely functioning state. The half set in the United States, by contrast, has very little physical danger; the risk is of an interracial romance in an era and place that did not accept such couples, and of Isaac’s distance from Helen because of the unknowns in his past.

How he ties those two together is enough of a spoiler that I won’t go into it, but it’s clever, and revealed early enough in the novel that you have time to adjust to this new knowledge and reassess what’s come before while still working through the remainders of both stories. It could seem like a gimmick, and it didn’t quite help that I encountered the same gimmick two months earlier in a novel from 2019, but Mengestu makes it work because the eventual revelation makes everything that came before it fit. (I had a suspicion of what was coming a few chapters ahead, so it’s not that big of a spoiler.)

There are just three characters in the book, the two named and the other young man in Africa, with Helen probably the weakest of the three. The two men seem to stand in for the two paths available to young men in such environments, with revolution brewing around them – the true believer, ready to stir up trouble and even take up arms; or the reluctant rebel, seeing no other path out of poverty but hardly believing in the cause of the rebels any more than he believes in the government. Helen comes across more as observer than participant, and it’s never really clear – despite her narration – why she went to bed with Isaac, or how they fell in love. Once there, what follows is far more convincing, but the lead up to that requires some buy-in.

If you accept the twist that ties the two narratives together, All Our Names works as a portrait of a man adrift in two countries, fleeing his homeland, where he couldn’t feel safe, for a new life as a refugee in a country that will always view him as an outsider. It left me hoping Mengestu will return to fiction at some point, as he hasn’t published anything in the six years since this book came out.

Next up: I’m several books behind but right now I’m reading 24: Life Stories and Lessons from the Say Hey Kid, Willie Mays’ and John Shea’s collaboration that’s part autobiography, part biography of the New York/San Francisco Giants great, due out on May 12th.

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→ February 6, 2020
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The Nickel Boys.

Colson Whitehead won both the Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Award for his last novel, The Underground Railroad, which re-imagined that escape network as an actual subterranean train system that helped slaves leave the South before the Civil War. His follow-up, The Nickel Boys, stays in the world of the mundane, drawing on the true story of a violent ‘reform school’ in the South to tell yet another dazzling, compelling story about race and the experience of people of color in the United States, and how white elites have continued to suppress the black populations in the South long after the Civil War was over.

The Nickel Boys takes place largely in the panhandle of Florida, near Tallahassee, at a fictional reform school for juveniles called the Nickel Academy, where white and black boys are separated into different houses, and the treatment is brutal and dehumanizing. It’s based on the Arthur G. Dozier School for Boys, which operated for over 100 years and at one point was the largest institution of its type in the country. The school closed in 2011 after a massive state investigation into charges of abuse, and a year later Erin Kimmerle, a forensic anthropologist from the University of South Florida, used ground-penetrating radar to find mass graves of on the site. They’ve found an estimated 80 corpses already, with exhumations ongoing. (The State of Florida officially apologized to the surviving boys in 2017, and as of September of 2019, after two-plus years of delays, work finally began on building memorials to the boys who died at Dozier and its satellite campus.)

Whitehead draws on survivors’ accounts to create the Nickel Academy, building his narrative around a boy named Elwood, arrested for being a passenger in a car that may have been stolen, ruining his hopes of bettering himself by continuing his education. Elwood has a strong moral compass, one that sometimes works against him because he speaks up when the world thinks he shouldn’t. Once imprisoned at Nickel, he meets Turner, another young African-American inmate who matches Elwood’s idealistic view of the world with an equally powerful cynicism, and a sense of self-preservation that he tries to impart to Elwood to keep the latter boy from meeting the fate of others who’ve ‘disappeared’ in the middle of the night.

Life at Nickel is about what you’d expect for black boys at a reform school run by whites in the 1950s and 1960s. They’re barely fed, because the administrators skim off the food sent for the black kids (less so when it’s for the white boys across the property) and sell it to local restaurants; they do the same with other supplies, like those for the boys’ education. They’re beaten in a building called the White House – the same as the name of the actual building that still stands on the Dozier property where illicit beatings took place – and many are sexually assaulted by guards. Boys who try to escape or otherwise draw the ire of the administration are taken from their beds in the middle of the night and tortured to death, after which their families – if they have any – are told that the boys ran away. There’s a nominal system for earning your way to release if you follow the rules and don’t push back, although in Whitehead’s depiction it’s hard to see many boys running this gauntlet successfully, given the venality of the administrators and bloodthirst of the guards.

The narrative itself revolves around Elwood and Turner, and Elwood’s own hopes that he’ll earn his way out – although the guards take him to the White House once – and tell the world about what’s going on at Nickel. Whitehead could have made this story even more brutal than it was, but instead he gives the reader just enough to depict the inhumanity of the school without dwelling on lurid details. This is a story of two boys, of two different ways of facing their incarceration and subjugation, and of a society that didn’t care at all about a few more dead black boys. Nothing Whitehead can write here is as damning to Florida, and to the American South, as what actually happened at Dozier and how long it has taken the state to even acknowledge the crimes committed against children of color at the school, but the way he depicts these two boys, especially the depth of Elwood’s character and the tragedy of his backstory, make The Nickel Boys an immersive and compelling read even though you know that any page could bring a scene of unbearable violence. I have no means or justification for predicting the Pulitzer winners, but if Whitehead wins for the second time in four years I won’t be the least bit surprised.

Next up: Julia Phillips’ Disappearing Earth.

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→ January 18, 2019
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An Unkindness of Ghosts.

Rivers Solomon’s debut novel An Unkindness of Ghosts bears a blatant stylistic similarity to the writing of N.K. Jemisin in her Broken Earth trilogy, from prose to characterization to both writers use of old-time religions in futuristic settings. And both writers put young women right at the heart of their respective stories, with Solomon giving us Aster, a young adult on a ‘generation ship’ that has, over centuries of drifting in space to an unknown and possibly nonexistent destination, devolved into a caste system by ship deck that incorporates skin color into its stratification, resulting in something that looks a good bit like American slavery.

Aster is a self-made scientist and doctor’s helper, often working with the Surgeon General, Theo, as well as tending plants in her botanarium, even though she’s a low-decker on the ship Matilda. That vessel has been in space at least 300 years, and thoughts of its Golden Land destination are more remote and have become tied up in a sort of doomsday religion that most of the ship practices – or, perhaps, that the upper-deck castes use to control those on the lower decks. Aster is neurodivergent, although Solomon never identifies her difference in any specific way, and for reasons that are only somewhat revealed by the end of the book, she’s marked for especially cruel treatment by the Lieutenant, a sadistic leader who is poised to take control if the Sovereign in charge dies. (You can guess whether that comes to pass.) Lune, Aster’s mother, took her own life the day Aster was born, but left behind cryptic clues in a series of notebooks that Aster and her bunk mate Giselle start to decipher when they realize its code may contain clues about the ship, as well as a potential way off of it.

There is, as we say on Twitter, a lot to unpack here, as Solomon has written a tight 350-page novel that incorporates race, religion, class, sex/gender, sexual harassment and assault, how people (mostly men) use and retain power, and a healthy dose of science fiction. There are women in the upper castes, but every authority figure we see is male. Women and girls on lower decks have darker skin, and are also used, to put it bluntly, for breeding, so the ship will have an ongoing supply of workers. Officials and guards have the tacit authority to rape or abuse women as they please, and it’s implied they do so with boys as well. One scene where Aster mouths off (with justification) to an upper-class twit woman lays bare the societal strictures that hold the barriers between upper and lower decks in place, backed by the force of the guard.

Unlike so many science fiction authors, good and bad, Solomon doesn’t spend a ton of time building the world in An Unkindness of Ghosts, giving the readers just what they need to understand what’s happening in the story, or where the characters might be in the architecture of the ship, but nothing extraneous. (Somehow there is meat on the ship, quite a bit of it, and I’m not sure how that one would work unless it’s supposed to be lab-grown.) The result is that the characters are extraordinarily well-developed for the genre – Aster, Theo, even Giselle and the caretaker known as Ainy or Melusine, whose importance grows as the book progresses. Solomon also defies many plot conventions by, again to be blunt, having smart characters still make stupid mistakes, especially Aster, who often acts without foresight because of her youth or how her brain works. She’s the hero, without question, but she’s flawed in a different way than your typical flawed hero. She’s flawed because she was born that way, and her successes come both in spite of that and often because of it, because she makes the best out of who she is, and can thus do things neurotypical people probably couldn’t. All of this, and other aspects of her character including some unspoken history of abuse and her unusual connection to Theo, make her one of the most interesting protagonists I’ve come across in a long time.

Solomon can get caught up in some clumsy prose, another similarity to Jemisin’s writing, such as when they start trying to describe the physics of space travel in their universe, especially the discovery Lune made that changes everything for Aster and her comrades, or in the description of Baby, the ship’s main power source. Yet they also display facility with creating language, giving each deck its own dialect, much the way slaves in different parts of the South would blend their native tongues with English and create new patois, such as the Gulla dialect still spoken today off the coast of South Carolina. The culture and economy of Matilda feel impossibly rich for a book this short; even when I wasn’t gripped by the plot, I was enveloped in Solomon’s world. The book starts slow, but stay with it; the last hundred pages are a barnburner and the ending is satisfying without becoming sentimental or obvious.

Next up: Still reading Camus’ The Plague.

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→ March 14, 2018
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Sing, Unburied, Sing.

Jesmyn Ward’s novel Sing, Unburied, Sing won the National Book Award for 2017, and is among the leading contenders for this year’s Pulitzer Prize in Fiction. It’s very much in the long tradition of African-American literature that employs magical realism to tell a story that shows readers the weight of historical racism borne by today’s African-Americans. It feels timely, and it does not shy away from any of the ugly truths of any such story, but it also felt too familiar, as Ward seems to cover ground that Toni Morrison, Alice Walker, and Zora Neale Hurston covered a few decades ago.

Ward unfurls the story through two narrators, with a third joining briefly in the heart of the book, who move together but offer different perspectives on the same events. JoJo is a precocious 13-year-old boy, living in the Deep South with his grandparents, Pappy and Mam, the latter of whom is dying of cancer. JoJo’s mother, Leonie, is a drug addict and inconsistently in the house, so JoJo has learned to take care of himself and his toddler sister, Kayla, short for Michaela. Their father, Michael, starts the novel in prison, and the bulk of the story revolves around a disastrous trip the three of them take to meet Michael when he’s released from prison, joined by Leonie’s addict friend Misty. Leonie is black, and Michael is white, and his father is a good ol’ boy racist who wants no part of his grandchildren. Leonie had a brother, Given, who was shot and killed by a white boy … who happened to be Michael’s cousin. When Leonie gets high, she sees Given.

There’s a second story, told by Pappy to JoJo in pieces over the course of the novel, relating to Pappy’s time in the prison camp known as Parchman (now a regular prison, where Michael has been doing time). Pappy tried to take care of Richie, a young boy about JoJo’s age who was sentenced to time in Parchman for stealing food to feed his many siblings, but it’s clear from the start of the story that something went awry. When JoJo gets to Parchman, he sees Richie as a ghost just as Leonie sees Given, and getting to the bottom of the story becomes crucial to JoJo and to our own understanding of what Ward is trying to say in the book as a whole.

The way that past racism continues to exact a toll on subsequent generations suffuses Sing, Unburied, Sing. JoJo, obviously aware of racism and mature beyond his years, feels like a great secret is being kept from him, while Kayla is too young to care, but has also come to see JoJo as a parent more than Leonie or the father she doesn’t even know. Pappy has never recovered from what happened at Parchman; Mam has never recovered from losing Given. (In a nice touch of realism, the white boy who shot Given doesn’t go to jail.) And Leonie wants to escape, physically and mentally, from just about everything other than Michael, but the superficial escape granted by drugs brings her visions of Given, a past she didn’t ask to inherit.

Ward’s portraits of her core characters and even some of the side ones – Misty and the lawyer Al, at the least – are compelling and well-rounded, although all of the central figures are broken in some fashion. Michael is a bit of a cipher here, but also doesn’t appear in much of the book. But the gimmick of the ghosts is a familiar trope in this genre, and Ward doesn’t seem to say anything particularly new here, or to give readers a new angle on the subject. Yes, historical racism perpetuates the socioeconomic disadvantages most African-Americans face in our society. I don’t think this book does enough to illuminate the problem or give anyone a window on how to address it. There is also way too much vomiting in this book. I’m all puked out, thanks.

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→ March 12, 2018
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The Warmth of Other Suns.

Isabel Wilkerson says she spent 15 years researching the book The Warmth of Other Suns: The Epic Story of America’s Great Migration, which won the National Book Critics Circle Award for General Nonfiction in 2010, and the research shows in the incredible depth of detail in this tripartite narrative about the mass movement of black Americans from the Jim Crow South to the north and west from 1915 to 1970. Wilkerson, who won a Pulitzer Prize for journalism while working for the New York Times, interviewed over 1200 people, and focused this sweeping saga on three African-Americans who fled the south’s limited opportunities and overt, violent racism, fleeing Mississippi, Florida, and Louisiana for Chicago, New York, and Los Angeles. Their stories are interwoven with each other’s and with other related histories of others who followed similar paths, and the tragedies of some of those who chose to stay behind.

Wilkerson gives us three characters who will accompany us through the book’s 600-odd pages (for me, 22-plus hours of audio): Ida Mae Gladney, a sharecropper’s wife from Mississippi who followed her husband, George, to Milwaukee and eventually the south side of Chicago; George Starling, a fruit picker from Eustis, Florida, who tried to organize other fruit pickers to earn better wages but fled from white landowners who set out to lynch him; and Robert Pershing Foster, a doctor from Louisiana who became a successful surgeon in Los Angeles and served many celebrity patients. The three all marry and raise children, and all find greater prosperity in the north than would ever have been possible where they were born, but all face the normal travails of any working-class life, and each carries some of the baggage of their birth and upbringing as outcasts in a racist country well into adulthood.

All three have compelling, often heartbreaking individual stories – although I think Wilkerson’s touch here is so deft that she could make anyone’s life story compelling – but none was more fascinating than the path taken by Dr. Foster, who left Monroe, Louisiana, and found success as a doctor in California both by outworking other doctors and by bringing an intense, precise sort of personal attention to his patients. Shedding his childhood name of Pershing after he moved to go by the more conventional name of Robert, Dr. Foster seems to have achieved the American dream against long odds, earning material wealth, marrying well, raising three daughters who themselves became successful, thus creating an ongoing chain of success and upward mobility from his own struggle. Yet he never seems to be able to escape the scars of a childhood (and possibly a marriage that brought him in-laws who never thought he was good enough) in a way that allows him to enjoy his success. Wilkerson illustrates him as a demanding, controlling husband who was meticulous about his own appearance and that of his wife, while he also was a compulsive gambler who clearly enjoyed how his spending at casinos bought him a form of respect at the casinos he frequented. Later in the book, Wilkerson tells of a gala Foster threw in his own honor, and how he agonized over every detail of the party, and how he couldn´t enjoy it during or afterwards because of perceived imperfections in the result.

At times a brutal, unsparing look at the treatment southern whites doled out to the black underclass as a matter of course, The Warmth of Other Suns is also deeply personal and empathetic. Wilkerson tells several stories of lynchings, including Leander Shaw and Claude Neal, the latter of whom was brutally tortured before he was hanged for a murder he may not have committed. She details the violent, racist reign of Lake County, Florida, Sheriff Willis McCall, accused at least 50 times of abusing or killing black suspects in his custody, once shooting two handcuffed black prisoners in cold blood and finally ousted from office after eight terms when he kicked a black prisoner to death. (McCall’s son, now 64, was arrested in January for molesting a young girl and possessing child pornography. He had stated in the past that his father was innocent of all charges of civil rights violations.) George Starling leaves Florida because a friend tells him local whites are going to take him to a swamp for a ´necktie party,´ racist slang for lynching. Ida Mae and her husband, also George, leave their life as sharecroppers under a benevolent but still manipulative, controlling landowner after a friend of theirs is beaten into senselessness over the theft of some turkeys that, it turns out, had just wandered off. Robert Foster isn’t driven out the same way but realizes that as a black doctor who can’t even receive admitting privileges at the white hospital, he’ll end up as just a ‘country doctor’ if he doesn’t move out of the land of Jim Crow.

The stories of violence and outright suppression are hard enough to fathom today, but the smaller indignities that the three protagonists and other African-American characters in the book faced fill in the gap and have even more impact because they’re easier to ingest today, when lynchings like that of James Byrd Jr. are extremely rare and result in actual convictions of the killers. When Dr. Foster is driving to California and can’t find a hotel room, even though some white proprietors are kind in rejecting him, lying to his face about vacancies, you can see and feel it. When Ida Mae has to take a series of temporary jobs in Chicago, where most employers will still choose only white candidates, she ends up in a situation right out of #MeToo. Even positive stories often come with a bitter reminder of what came before; George Starling, working as a porter on a north-south rail line, is told to direct black passengers to certain cars when the train passes into the south even after Jim Crow has been made illegal, and has to subtly inform these passengers of their right to say no, at risk of his own employment.

Wilkerson’s personal approach to the book does not exclude the academic research on the subject, but she instead sprinkles details and observations of experts on the timing, motive, and extent of the migration – which came in waves, and finally slowed after the Civil Rights Act was passed in 1964 and slowly implemented over the following decade. (And, of course, we now see one party trying to roll it back, along with the Voting Rights Act of 1965.) This is a work of scholarship, yet also a labor of love, as no author could spend so much time and become so invested in a subject unless it were of abiding personal interest to her in the first place. It’s also a potent reminder of why African-Americans today remain at an economic disadvantage relative to whites, and how we are simply repeating the sins of our fathers when we deny black Americans their right to vote, or incarcerate them on nonviolent drug charges, or underfund urban schools as if they were the ‘colored’ schools of the Jim Crow era.

Next up: Margaret Creighton’s The Electrifying Fall of Rainbow City: Spectacle and Assassination at the 1901 Worlds Fair.

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