WINGS OF RED

A young man, badly beaten up by life, meanders around the city in this work of autofiction.

June Papers has bet, and lost, his last $10 in a game of dice. He can’t pay the rent and, after that night, he’ll be homeless on the streets of New City (an obvious, if somewhat inexplicable, stand-in for New York). June, a Black writer with an MFA and a day job as a substitute teacher, spends most of his time wandering the streets, handing out copies of his first book, Strays, and jotting in his notebook. But June is not lost. Equipped with a love for his city and an unrelenting thirst, he doesn’t succumb to the hopelessness of his situation, persevering despite getting bruised in the process. June brings the reader inside the public school system, to his grandmother’s home on Martha’s Vineyard, and into his close-knit and supportive, if flawed, community of friends. Occasionally speaking directly to an audience, June offers up pithy, somewhat ironic advice, talking just as much to his future reader as he is to himself. Jennings’ distinct style can be jarring at first, but the reader will quickly sink into his rhythm and appreciate the lively nature of his present-tense verbiage and his quick syntax. And despite the weighty topics of homelessness, racism, and capitalism, among others, Jennings doesn’t lapse into either overt cynicism or rose-colored optimism, instead settling into a gritty and gripping middle: “Monday comes around and I find myself on another couch not my own. I kneel before it and say a prayer. I brush teeth, pack bag, and step out into the cold.”

A portrait of a writer that is at once harsh and tender.