Breath, Eyes, Memory, by Edwidge Danticat and Party of Two, by Jasmine Guillory

Breath, Eyes, Memory is a book that has been on my radar for a long time. I first remember coming across it in 1997 when I worked at a bookstore that stocked course books for NYU and the New School. I have no idea what class it was for, but someone had ordered it as a text book. I think the title struck a chord with me? For all these years, it has just kind of remained there, at the edge of my awareness. I actually have no idea how I ended up owning a copy or how long I've had it, though I think I must have found it at a thrift store, probably after I started reading for my world books project. I had it in the back of my head for Haiti, though I had a couple other books in mind for Haiti as well -- books that didn't center on emigrants. But, of course, large-scale emigration is a reality of modern Haiti. And immigrant stories are a major part of the American story. This book has both: the stories of those who emigrated, and of those who stayed behind. Best of all, for me personally, it has Brooklyn. A Brooklyn close to the one I live in. Physically close, at least. The narrator's mother's Brooklyn home is on Nostrand Avenue, which is my cross street today. On her arrival in Brooklyn, the narrator attends a Haitian Adventist school; I live directly across the street from a Haitian Adventist school. (Not the same school -- if the school in the book is based on a real school, I imagine it's one in Flatbush.) Even as a kid in Brooklyn in the 80s, our landlord was Haitian and his daughter was my babysitter. But of course, I also live (and lived) in a completely different Brooklyn. 

Families are complicated things. Breath, Eyes, Memory takes in four generations of women and the love and hurt between  them. This book beautifully, painfully illustrated how trauma can be passed down from generation to generation, from parent to child. It also leaves open the hope of breaking this cycle. 

When I finished Breath, Eyes, Memory this morning, I definitely didn't expect I'd finish a second book by this evening, but I went downstairs to check the mail and there was Party of Two waiting for me. I think I read Royal Holiday over two days, but that one aside, I've read every one of Jasmine Guillory's books in the space of a day. Her books are perfect for those days when you want to do nothing and read something that will leave you smiling and satisfied. I needed one of those days so badly after the week I had, so this book arrived at just the right moment. It was delightful in all the ways I wanted it to be. 

There There, by Tommy Orange

An interesting thing about There There is that it tells you from the very outset what it intends to do. It's an ambitious book that aims to tell stories that are unknown outside the community they come from. I had never given any thought to the urban Native American experience before reading this book, and certainly wasn't aware (or had never stopped to consider) that there were enclaves and communities of Native people in American cities. There There wants to tell you their stories. And it does. In less than 300 pages, Tommy Orange takes you through a large cast of characters, all with Native ancestry of some sort and ties to Oakland, California, living out a whole range of experiences, but with common threads. He does this so deftly that you develop feelings for characters you only spend a few pages with. It's really something. I feel like I have more to say about this book, but not the energy to say it -- it's been a rough few weeks -- so I guess I'll leave it there. 

The Sellout, by Paul Beatty, and Yellow Back Radio Broke-Down, by Ishmael Reed

A friend came to visit me a couple years ago and left this book behind. It was already on my to-read list at the time, but it got shelved and set aside. (My to-read list is very long, and in a state of constant fluctuation.) The events of the last couple weeks inspired me to make a conscious effort to read more African American writers and so The Sellout finally got its moment. Plus I got another tick on the list of Booker winners I've read; this one is extra special as the first American Booker winner. 

The Sellout is a brilliant work of satire. This bleak picture of de facto segregation in Los Angeles and the narrator's attempt to uplift his community by reinstating de jure segregation (or at least the outward appearance of it), includes some of the funniest writing I've ever read. There were lines (not a few!) that made me burst out laughing as I read on my couch. And there were lines that made me cringe, where I'm sure my face looked just like a wide-eyed grimacing emoji. And there were lines so perfectly true they stopped me in my place. 

I posted about this book on Instagram and a friend in Italy messaged me to ask if it was a good read. She has the Italian translation. (Lo Schiavista, it's called in Italian, which if I'm translating correctly means The Slaver.) It's hard for me to imagine how this book will translate; not into Italian, but to a reader not steeped in America's particular dysfunctions. I'll be curious to hear how she finds it. 

It's hard for me to articulate what makes The Sellout so powerful. I think the narrator puts it best when he says, "It's illegal to yell 'Fire!' in a crowded, theater, right?" ... "Well, I've whispered 'Racism' in a post-racial world."

I pulled out Yellow Back Radio Broke-Down along with The Sellout last Monday, undecided as to which I should read first. Ishmael Reed actually gets a passing reference in The Sellout, when the narrator is taken by his father to Mississippi to engage in some "reckless eyeballing" in an attempt to expose him to direct racism. "Thanks to years of my father's black vernacular pop quizzes and an Ishmael Reed book he kept on top of the toilet for years, I knew that 'reckless eyeballing' was the act of a black male deigning to look at a southern white female." 

I had to read an excerpt from Yellow Back Radio Broke-Down for a class I took in 1999 (a portion of the book is reprinted in the Norton Anthology, Postmodern American Fiction, which was our text book). I remember liking the excerpt, but not much else. Several years later I found a used copy of the full book and picked it up. Like The Sellout, it has sat on my shelves since, waiting to be read. A certain logic told me I should have read Yellow Back Radio first: Ishmael Reed is a generation older than Paul Beatty and Yellow Back Radio was written nearly 50 years earlier. It's also a work of satire, an absurdist send up of the old west, among other things, with some supernaturalism and modern technology mixed in. A quick and entertaining read.

The Nickel Boys, by Colson Whitehead, and The Hollow of Fear, by Sherry Thomas

I said recently that I feel like I keep choosing the wrong books to read. The Famished Road is still sitting on my side table with a bookmark at page 187, where I placed it on May 8th. For the past couple weeks, sitting on top of The Famished Road, has been James Salter's Light Years, which I started on May 25 and have been making my way through slowly, without ever feeling very motivated to read it. On Friday, I thought I would try and plow through it this weekend so I could move on (one unfinished book hanging over me is a situation I can make myself comfortable with, but two is hard for me), but when I picked it up yesterday morning and found that about 5 pages from where I was reading was the start of a new section, I decided to take that as an opportunity to set it aside for the longer term as well. So yesterday I started The Nickel Boys and today I finished it. 

I likely wouldn't have gotten around to it for some time — I never buy hardcovers, and rarely buy new books, but I have this copy of The Nickel Boys courtesy of my college roommate, Kelly, who mailed it to me from Oakland, CA along with Ocean Vuong's On Earth We're Briefly Gorgeous a few weeks ago. (Sometime before, I sent her Homegoing, Circe, and Conversations with Friends — trading books is great!) Kelly read it for a book club and it was right after the announcement of its Pulitzer win that she offered to send it, and she wrote me, "My bookclub members have been silent since the Pulitzer announcement. Covid got real serious while we were reading Nickel Boys and I am the only person who finished the book. It’s good throughout, but there is something kind of *no spoilers* to look forward to at the end. So I wonder if they are confused as to how this book could have won, while I am not at all." So, that was the information I had going in. Really that and nothing else — I avoid reading much about books I intend to read. What can I say: she was exactly right. The book is good throughout. It manages something that I think Whitehead managed in The Underground Railroad as well, which is to tell you about awful, and violent, and heart-rending situations in a way that is gentle but doesn't diminish the violence. I think this is a difficult line to straddle. 

This book was full of quotes from Martin Luther King, Jr., as Whitehead says in the acknowledgements, "it was energizing to hear his voice in my head." With the bizarre cooption of King that is so common today, it was refreshing to read the contextualized, radical King. The central tragedy in The Nickel Boys is that the main character, Elwood Curtis, has this strong sense of right and wrong and justice. He believes. Even in the worst circumstances, he expects there will be an order to things. Early on in the book, when he's brought for punishment along with 3 other boys from the reform school he attends, he counts the lashes the others receive and tries to make sense of it, to estimate the number he will receive, as if there's a logic to the brutality that's meted out — a logic he can beat. He never really loses this sense: very near the end of the book is a sentence that really hit me to the core: "The world had whispered its rules to him for his whole life and he refused to listen, hearing instead a higher order." Elwood's belief in the fundamental justice of things is his beautiful, fatal flaw. 

With The Nickel Boys, I finally felt I had chosen the right book for the first time since The Dark Child (which, granted, was only a month ago — but still). It didn't hurt that it felt like the right book for right now. 

Last weekend, I also needed a break from Light Years that wasn't The Famished Road (or vice versa) and I had recently received The Hollow of Fear in the mail via PaperbackSwap. I thought it would be the perfect thing because I wanted something that was basically pure diversion, but I'm not sure it worked out that way. I did read the whole thing in 2 days, but I didn't get much pleasure out of it. That probably had as much to do with my own mood as with the book. The last couple weeks have been rough for me for reasons I can't really articulate because I don't really understand them myself. Partly, I think it's just that the external events are finally getting to me, whatever that means. For the first two months of being home, I felt I was adapting surprisingly well to never leaving the house. In fact, I still feel that way. To the extent that I've left, I've mostly done it because I feel like I have to for other people. In any case, Memorial Day weekend, I had a 4-day weekend, which I had been looking forward to and then I found somehow unsatisfying. The following weekend, I had taken a day off for my birthday, so I had another long weekend and this was the weekend when I read The Hollow of Fear. I think my looming birthday (I have started to acknowledge that birthdays make me emotional) and the various commitments I felt related to it were contributors to my mood. In any case, I thought that this would be the perfect thing to get me out of my mood, or make me forget it for a while, but in fact I felt like I just read it dutifully. In other circumstances, maybe I would have found it fun. It's hard to know.