ONE KIND FAVOR

A stylistically thorny novel about a lynching that encompasses prose-poem, satire, ghost story, and other rhetorical somersaults.

The heart of the sixth novel by experimentalist McIlvoy—author of 57 Octaves Below Middle C (2017, etc.)—is a murder: Lincoln, a Black man, is found hanging from a swing set in the predominantly White burg of Cord, North Carolina, aka Crackertown. Investigators are summoned, locals are questioned, and Lincoln’s mother mourns. But little here follows the arc of a procedural. McIlvoy’s fury at racial violence stoked by “Trumpspawn” is clear: Lincoln is lynched on the day of Trump’s election, for starters, and the bigoted authorities are quick to dismiss the murder as a suicide. But the novel’s approach to the killing is oblique. What to make, for instance, of Mr. Panther, one of the investigators, who becomes a habitué of the town while carrying machetes on his person? Or that he falls for the fiddle-playing daughter of a prominent local who died years before and has been reincarnated as a mockingbird? Call it the triumph of free imagination over ignorance and hate: Acker, a character plainly inspired by the late experimental artist and writer Kathy Acker, is the novel’s guiding spirit of art, inclusion, and freedom. As the novel progresses, more characters become (or are revealed to be) “Presences,” ghosts who serve to remind others of the town's racist past and present that the locals prefer to keep unspoken. Throughout the story, McIlvoy pivots from lyrical riffs (“the bloodrust airtaste of the doused, excited, heavy rope”), dark-humored passages about Second Amendment hard-liners, and abstruse plotting. It’s a perpetually disorienting book, but McIlvoy’s approach does establish a certain properly righteous mood: In a town thick with injustice, placid prose and straightforward plotting simply won’t do.

An unorthodox but compelling cry against racist violence.