A Novel Doesn’t Have to Be About an Individual
This is an edition of the revamped Books Briefing, our editors’ weekly guide to the best in books. Sign up for it here.
Our lives are shaped by networks: of family, friends, and colleagues, or the wider ones that encompass neighbors and fellow citizens. We exist in relation to others. And yet novels, beginning almost as soon as Don Quixote set out on his quest, have long fixated on the individual as a shaper of his or her fate, as the fundamental unit for a story. The individual acts or is acted upon, and narrative results from this tension. Which is why James McBride’s most recent two novels are so radical and satisfying. They are, at their foundation, about networks. The unit he’s interested in is community.
First, here are four new stories from The Atlantic’s Books section:
- Ibram X. Kendi on why working class does not equal white
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- The greatest feminist novelist you may not have heard of
- The owls are not what they seem.
McBride’s latest is The Heaven and Earth Grocery Store, which Ayana Mathis wrote about for our September issue. Describing the plot of a McBride novel is a little hard because his books are structured like relay races: One charismatic character hands off the story to another every few pages as the world they inhabit together keeps expanding. Naming that world itself is much easier, and in this case it’s the Chicken Hill neighborhood of Pottstown, Pennsylvania, in the 1920s. At the time, Chicken Hill was home to a hodgepodge of Jewish immigrants from Eastern Europe and Black families that had recently migrated from the South. Their shared poverty leads to a fairly copacetic coexistence, one that deepens as the book progresses and members of this lively community work together to save one of their vulnerable own, a 12-year-old deaf orphan named Dodo.
Mathis is taken with how in McBride’s fiction “almost nothing of significant value is accomplished by people acting alone”—and it’s hard not to agree. She sees this as part of his wider project of undoing our sense that the past was purely segregationist, with racial and ethnic groups existing only as divided and mutually antagonistic entities. But he is not paving over hard truths: “McBride’s integrationist vision isn’t utopian or easy. Nor is it assimilationist,” Mathis writes. “His fiction doesn’t seek to erase differences, or to deny the realities of racism and marginalization.”
The first McBride novel I read was Deacon King Kong, which was similarly jostling with a cast of hundreds, most residents of an imagined housing project in Red Hook, Brooklyn, in the 1960s. At first, I found the book’s baton-passing quality jarring. The same was true of The Heaven and Earth Grocery Store. Who should claim my sympathies? Maybe Moshe Ludlow, the Jewish music-hall owner; or Addie Timblin, the Black woman who works for Moshe and is particularly attached to his wife, Chona; or maybe Paper, the town gossip; or the hulking Sicilian immigrant nicknamed Big Soap … And that becomes the beauty of the novel. Rooting for any one of them connects you to the whole chain of interconnected characters, and what you end up caring about is the chain itself. McBride’s hit memoir, The Color of Water, provides some evidence about how he earned this worldview. His mother—raised Orthodox Jewish but disowned when she married a Black man—was saved by the Red Hook community, which took her up and showed her and her 12 children the kind of care she never received as a girl.
What binds his characters is what most concerns McBride. In keeping with the jazzman’s ethic (he’s an accomplished jazz musician himself), he lets them each take solos, glorious horn-blowing ones. But the power of the story is in the way these individuals all fit together—sometimes hindering but more often helping one another muddle through their shared reality.
What to Read
If I Survive You, by Jonathan Escoffery
Escoffery’s debut collection of linked stories is a tale of biting sibling rivalry and a moving family saga about the immigrant experience and living between cultures in Miami. Our American-born protagonist, Trelawny, clashes with his Jamaican-born older brother, Delano, in their disparate pursuits of financial stability, parental love, and masculinity. Delano, the clear favorite, follows in his father’s footsteps by supporting his wife and children as a landscaper, while Trelawny pursues a college education. But after the recession, Trelawny’s degree fails to protect him from living out of his car and working a slew of precarious jobs (predatory building management, Craigslist sexual race play). Escoffery is a wordsmith who keeps us laughing even as he runs his characters through capitalism’s meat grinder. When the siblings’ fortunes are flipped, Trelawny must decide whether to be a better brother to Delano than he’s been to him. The choice is a sour one, laced with that particular ache that only bone-deep disappointment engenders. — Ruth Madievsky
From our list: Six books that show no one can hurt you like a sibling
Out Next Week
???? In Defense of Love: An Argument, by Ron Rosenbaum
???? The Marriage Question: George Eliot’s Double Life, by Clare Carlisle
???? The Great White Bard: How to Love Shakespeare While Talking About Race, by Farah Karim-Cooper
Your Weekend Read
The Three Attacks on Intellectual Freedom
“There is more than one way to burn a book,” Ray Bradbury once said. “And the world is full of people running about with lit matches.” The second threat to intellectual freedom comes from inside the house. This threat is the subject of a new report that PEN America has just published, “Booklash: Literary Freedom, Online Outrage, and the Language of Harm.” The report is focused on the recent pattern of publishers and authors canceling their own books, sometimes after publication, under pressure organized online or by members, often younger ones, of their own staffs. PEN has tracked 31 cases of what might be called literary infanticide since 2016; half occurred in just the past two years. “None of these books were withdrawn based on any allegation of factual disinformation, nor glorification of violence, nor plagiarism,” the report notes. “Their content or author was simply deemed offensive.”
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