FAT TIME

A collection of wildly inventive and intensely realized stories provide electrifying jolts to the very notion of “Black Experience.”

Allen is both a poet and novelist whose prose reverberates with colorful imagery and crystalline lyricism. In his new story collection, he shows greater assurance with plotting and characterization, which only bolsters his agile imagination. In a few pages at a time, Allen can endow even the ghosts of dead children, as in “Four Girls,” with vibrant, combustible, and poignant personalities. In similar fashion, he can persuasively envision real-life personages from the recent past, as in “Heads,” which has rock god Jimi Hendrix hanging out with British painter Francis Bacon somewhere around the disquieting hinge of the 1960s and ’70s, each man reaching for his own transcendence through distortions of time and space. And speaking of space: In “Orbits,” Allen reimagines the near conclusion of Muhammad Ali’s boxing career on a planet Earth with émigrés from the moon helping him prepare for his 1980 bout against Larry Holmes. Other prominent Black men include Jack Johnson, the Ali of his era, who’s tearing through Australia (“Fat Time”), and Miles Davis, gloomily huddled in his Manhattan apartment (“Pinocchio”). Not all of Allen’s characters are famous; “Big Ugly Baby” chronicles the yearslong erotic intimacies between two at-risk teen boys, while in “Fornication Camp,” couples gather at an Illinois religious retreat in a villa moved from Italy and reconstructed piece by piece by Abraham Lincoln. The range of subject matter and the ingenuity of the storylines draw readers in, but it’s Allen’s intricately poetic language that keeps them there, as when he describes Hendrix noodling on his guitar and how he “knows how to worry chords into the black shape of time. Knows how to anchor weight on a string and sink a barbed note into the muddy depths below, then bend that string and yank up a struggling catfish.” The whole collection hums and throbs with such startling craft.

A potentially transformative exhibition of visionary storytelling.