I SEE A NEW AMERICA

A historical novel of race, love, and destiny set in a tumultuous 1960s America.

It’s the summer of 1960 and Royal Finley is a black graduate student at the University of Chicago. His friend and fellow student Rodney Johnson, who’s also black, is sympathetic to the Black Nationalist movement—Malcolm X makes a cameo in the opening pages, which leads to a conversation between him and Royal—while Royal adheres to a more individualistic conception of human freedom, telling his friend: “It’ll take more than laws to make us free.” Royal is also sexually impotent—in contrast to the philandering Rodney—and his anxieties about this undercut much of the novel. He develops a relationship with Nadine Miles, a white graduate student who studies African history. Their story is set against the backdrop of the civil rights struggles of the ’60s, encompassing African nationalism, miscegenation laws, and the Freedom Riders. In Indianapolis, Royal experiences a tense exchange with Nadine’s family over their relationship. Questions of race and desire—and how the two are intertwined—loom large for Royal, who, by the end of the book, ends up advising Lyndon Johnson on school integration. The book’s sense of history feels authentic—true to the “combination of fact and fiction” that Cheek references in the preface. Near the middle of the book, the author portrays Royal looking “intensely into his soul,” where he sees “confusing images of his obscure and vague sense of ethnicity.” This is the novel’s central theme, as Royal’s rise to the heights of the civil rights movement offers an effective portrait in miniature of the decade’s political transformation. Perhaps one of the most intriguing aspects of this book is how it interweaves the biographical and the historical as the protagonist searches for authenticity, finding himself repeatedly “returning to his ethnic roots to reexamine his life’s quilt.” The book’s spiritual tone and stilted prose may alienate some readers, though, as in lines such as “they embraced and shared the nectar of their individual souls.”

An earnest novel about one man’s personal transformation during a decade of political change.