BED STUY

At the center of McGill’s first novel is an affair between a young Black man and a White Jewish woman nearly twice his age.

Rashid is in his 20s, waiting tables at an Italian restaurant, when he meets Rachel, who is married with two kids. Rachel’s suburban life is worlds away from Rashid’s own. Despite that, or perhaps in part because of it, their attraction to one another is immediate, and intense. Or so McGill says. Throughout the book, conversations between the two characters feel oddly lukewarm. The reader knows of their passion for one another because we are told of it directly, not because that passion rises off the page of its own accord. But in nearly everything else, McGill is a master of nuance, and he teases out the knots in Rashid and Rachel’s relationship with ease. While Rachel seems hell-bent on self-destruction, Rashid slowly paves his own way—he’s working out the man he’d like to be and the life he’d like to lead. Rashid’s talks with Marlon, a close friend, are some of the most moving passages in the book even as they pester and tease each other. “Your white girl,” Marlon says. “You still seeing her?” “Yeah, I’m still seeing her. Seeing her tomorrow night, in fact,” Rashid says. “So this becoming a regular thing, huh?” Marlon says. “She still married?” McGill’s prose can acquire a quick, musical rhythm before settling into more expansive sections that deftly take on questions of race and class. In many ways, the novel is a wonder to behold. If only its central conceit—two characters flooded by a massive, gasping love—had shown slightly more chemistry.

The novel is deeply moving in many respects, but its central relationship never quite convinces.