THE COLOR OF FAMILY

Decades in the life of a singular family.

In the acknowledgements, McGill writes about how he was inspired by J.D. Salinger’s Nine Stories—and how it led him to write “my own story about a large and quirky Black family.” The book opens with the story of that family’s origins in 1963, when Morehouse College student Harold Payne meets Camille Preston, who is singing in a vocal group. The two quickly fall in love; in an early chapter set decades later, the omniscient narration recounts a family portrait and offers brief details about each of the couple’s six children—as well as the two children of Harold and a Frenchwoman with whom he’d had an affair. For instance, McGill writes that Kassandra, one of Harold and Camille’s children, attended her prom “dressed as Angela Davis and proceeded to get thrown out by security for dancing too provocatively to a Prince song and making out on the dance floor with her date, the head cheerleader of a rival high school.” Much of the novel centers around a conflict between brothers James and Devon involving a car accident that leaves Devon in need of rehabilitation. As the two grow older, the conflict takes an unsettling turn when James develops diabetes and Devon refuses to donate a kidney. Eventually, Devon gets involved with the drug trade—“no one would suspect a quadriplegic student from an upper-class East Coast family of being a dealer, much less a highly competent one”—and wrestles with enduring loss in his life. If there’s a drawback here, it’s that some of the Paynes feel underutilized in the larger context.

A uniquely structured novel with memorable characters and a generational scope.