NEXUS

A novel about the ways crime and racism intertwine in the lives of three families.

As Worrell’s novel opens in Northern California, 2022, a racist young woman named Daria Keenan (“web-designer and regional white-pride organizer by day”) and her group of white supremacist friends have targeted Carl Graham, a 68-year-old Black muckraking journalist whose inquiries into the shady D’Bettano corporation have made him the enemy of high-powered white supremacists in California. Daria herself is a fervent disciple of former Trump aide and ex-con Steve Bannon, and her powerful aunt, Jeri-Lee, is even more closely connected with the felon-in-chief’s inner circle. “Jeri-Lee loved having power,” readers are told, “power in material wealth, power in social settings, power in politics, power in controlling the narrative.” Daria and her friends tail Graham, and they no sooner run him off the road than the setting switches to the 1960s Canarsie neighborhood of Brooklyn. Here, readers meet an array of characters, from Det. Dan McBride, who’s investigating Paolo D’Bettano (“Many criminals are noisy about their criminality,” he thinks about the sly D’Bettano. “A rare few are truly genius at being low-profile monsters”) to Mary DeLuca and her best friend Jimmy Fain, whose father, Irish immigrant Jack Fain, is killed by mobsters for advocating against the racism of the time (“Humankind’s alarming sociopathic tendencies across all continents bewildered and disgusted Jack”).

This tremendously ambitious novel seeks to flesh out and dramatize several genealogies of racial animus. Worrell ably meets this goal by amassing a great deal of historical information and filling it with flesh and color. The book’s descriptions of mid-century Brooklyn are as evocative as anything written on the region in decades, and the frequent detours to older history effectively ground the later action and go a long way to making this author the Michener of Canarsie. This all comes with one drawback: The book’s plot lines are difficult to follow, and often disappear for whole chapters at a time since the storyline jumps back six decades to tell the life story of one character’s father, and then jumps back three decades more to tell the whole story of that character’s grandfather. This approach validates the generational arc of the book, but it can make for maddeningly distracting reading. When a character is run off the road, seemingly to his death, readers might not want to wade through 30 chapters, numerous family trees, and multiple waves of immigration to find out what happened to him. Fortunately, the characters are uniformly well drawn, from foundational social justice saints, like poor Jack Fain, to a far more complex figure, like Carl Graham. Readers equipped with lots of curiosity and a good deal of patience will find both amply rewarded in these pages, particularly in the morally devastating concluding sections, when ethical condemnations are handed out: “Too many people straddle the line, unable to keep it real and maintain what can honestly be reasoned to be sensible convictions or principals.”

A stirring if discursive saga of immigration and racism.