Ruffin’s surrealist take on racism owes much to Invisible Man and George S. Schuyler’s similarly themed 1931 satire, Black...
As with Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man, the black narrator of this rakishly funny and distressingly up-to-the-minute debut novel doesn’t disclose his name, because, he says, “I’m a phantom, [and] a figment.”
In a near-future America where racial divisions have become, if anything, deeper and bleaker than they are now, our nameless narrator has, through guile, pluck, spit, and polish, worked his way to associate attorney with Seasons, Ustis & Malveaux, a powerful law firm with tentacles reaching to every stratum of a city known here only as the City. Though wound tight from having to look over his shoulder at every potential office competitor, the narrator is determined to do whatever he can to ingratiate himself with his bosses and secure a full partnership, whether by enduring cornball plantation tours, struggling to overcome courtroom jitters, or agreeing to be chairman and sole African-American member of the firm's “diversity committee.” It’s all for the sake of his biracial son, Nigel, who has a black birthmark on his face that's grown so large over time that the narrator will try anything to make it fade, from oversized baseball caps for blocking the sun to skin-lightening creams whose application bewilders Nigel and enrages his white mother, Penny. The narrator is desperate for his son to avoid the fate of many other black men who have been consigned either to substandard neighborhoods or, as is the case with the narrator’s estranged father, prison. (“The world is a centrifuge that patiently waits to separate my Nigel from his basic human dignity,” the narrator laments.) But a bigger paycheck from his firm would enable the narrator to pay for what promises to be the ultimate solution: an experimental medical procedure that will not only remove Nigel’s birthmark, but make him look totally Caucasian. Whether they're caused by delusion, naiveté, dread, rage, or some combination thereof, the narrator’s excesses sometimes make him as hard for the reader to endure as he is for those who either love or barely tolerate him. But his intensely rhythmic and colorful voice lifts you along with him on his frenetic odyssey.
Ruffin’s surrealist take on racism owes much to Invisible Man and George S. Schuyler’s similarly themed 1931 satire, Black No More. Yet the ominous resurgence of white supremacy during the Trump era enhances this novel’s resonance and urgency.Pub Date: Jan. 29, 2019
ISBN: 978-0-525-50906-6
Page Count: 336
Publisher: One World/Random House
Review Posted Online: Oct. 27, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 15, 2018
BOOK REVIEW
Jonathan Livingston Kitty, it’s not.
A lonely postman learns that he’s about to die—and reflects on life as he bargains with a Hawaiian-shirt–wearing devil.
The 30-year-old first-person narrator in filmmaker/novelist Kawamura’s slim novel is, by his own admission, “boring…a monotone guy,” so unimaginative that, when he learns he has a brain tumor, the bucket list he writes down is dull enough that “even the cat looked disgusted with me.” Luckily—or maybe not—a friendly devil, dubbed Aloha, pops onto the scene, and he’s willing to make a deal: an extra day of life in exchange for being allowed to remove something pleasant from the world. The first thing excised is phones, which goes well enough. (The narrator is pleasantly surprised to find that “people seemed to have no problem finding something to fill up their free time.”) But deals with the devil do have a way of getting complicated. This leads to shallow musings (“Sometimes, when you rewatch a film after not having seen it for a long time, it makes a totally different impression on you than it did the first time you saw it. Of course, the movie hasn’t changed; it’s you who’s changed") written in prose so awkward, it’s possibly satire (“Tears dripped down onto the letter like warm, salty drops of rain”). Even the postman’s beloved cat, who gains the power of speech, ends up being prim and annoying. The narrator ponders feelings about a lost love, his late mother, and his estranged father in a way that some readers might find moving at times. But for many, whatever made this book a bestseller in Japan is going to be lost in translation.
Jonathan Livingston Kitty, it’s not.Pub Date: March 12, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-250-29405-0
Page Count: 176
Publisher: Flatiron Books
Review Posted Online: Feb. 16, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2019
Inspired by disclosures of a real-life Florida reform school’s long-standing corruption and abusive practices, Whitehead’s...
The acclaimed author of The Underground Railroad (2016) follows up with a leaner, meaner saga of Deep South captivity set in the mid-20th century and fraught with horrors more chilling for being based on true-life atrocities.
Elwood Curtis is a law-abiding, teenage paragon of rectitude, an avid reader of encyclopedias and after-school worker diligently overcoming hardships that come from being abandoned by his parents and growing up black and poor in segregated Tallahassee, Florida. It’s the early 1960s, and Elwood can feel changes coming every time he listens to an LP of his hero Martin Luther King Jr. sermonizing about breaking down racial barriers. But while hitchhiking to his first day of classes at a nearby black college, Elwood accepts a ride in what turns out to be a stolen car and is sentenced to the Nickel Academy, a juvenile reformatory that looks somewhat like the campus he’d almost attended but turns out to be a monstrously racist institution whose students, white and black alike, are brutally beaten, sexually abused, and used by the school’s two-faced officials to steal food and supplies. At first, Elwood thinks he can work his way past the arbitrary punishments and sadistic treatment (“I am stuck here, but I’ll make the best of it…and I’ll make it brief”). He befriends another black inmate, a street-wise kid he knows only as Turner, who has a different take on withstanding Nickel: “The key to in here is the same as surviving out there—you got to see how people act, and then you got to figure out how to get around them like an obstacle course.” And if you defy them, Turner warns, you’ll get taken “out back” and are never seen or heard from again. Both Elwood’s idealism and Turner’s cynicism entwine into an alliance that compels drastic action—and a shared destiny. There's something a tad more melodramatic in this book's conception (and resolution) than one expects from Whitehead, giving it a drugstore-paperback glossiness that enhances its blunt-edged impact.
Inspired by disclosures of a real-life Florida reform school’s long-standing corruption and abusive practices, Whitehead’s novel displays its author’s facility with violent imagery and his skill at weaving narrative strands into an ingenious if disquieting whole.Pub Date: July 16, 2019
ISBN: 978-0-385-53707-0
Page Count: 224
Publisher: Doubleday
Review Posted Online: Jan. 20, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2019
PERSPECTIVES
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SEEN & HEARD
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