A flawed but admirably ambitious bildungsroman.
A young man struggles to support his family in a fractured Nigerian homeland.
Awoke’s debut novel is narrated by Dimkpa, whom we first meet at 14 getting a blunt education about Nigeria’s social and political stratification. His mother is a devoted Catholic while his father is an adherent to Igbo tradition; when the father is bullied out of his promised role as a town elder, Dimkpa learns that his family has been deemed “ohu ma,” or outsiders, by the community. But why? His search for answers (and money to support his family) takes him to Lagos, where an abusive Muslim matron pits the houseboys against each other for sport; to the meeting rooms of Biafran revolutionaries, who are dealing with their own internal strife; to quarries and mines where he and his friends risk their lives; to a university where he might put his passion for writing to use. (The book makes reference to numerous classic African and African American writers, including Toni Morrison, Chinua Achebe, Alain Mabanckou, and Ralph Ellison, though Dimkpa has a particular affection for The Catcher in the Rye.) Lyrical interstitial chapters slowly disclose the mystery of Dimkpa’s family status as ohu ma, but the prose is more typically plainspoken. That makes the story clear, but also dulls it somewhat: Awoke plainly aspires to offer a cross-section of contemporary Nigeria and its shortcomings, but it lacks the tart, satiric bite that would match Dimkpa’s sense of injustice. And the strategy of bouncing across milieus means that characters and plot threads are occasionally dropped. Still, the novel has a sturdy spine in Dimkpa, who piles up psychic and physical scars throughout his travels as he realizes that to be loyal to any one tribe is to be complicit in factionalism and violence. “Hatred, it seems, is our heritage,” he laments.
A flawed but admirably ambitious bildungsroman.Pub Date: June 25, 2024
ISBN: 9781646221905
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Catapult
Review Posted Online: April 5, 2024
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 2024
A welcome literary resurrection that deserves a place alongside Wright’s best-known work.
A falsely accused Black man goes into hiding in this masterful novella by Wright (1908-1960), finally published in full.
Written in 1941 and '42, between Wright’s classics Native Son and Black Boy, this short novel concerns Fred Daniels, a modest laborer who’s arrested by police officers and bullied into signing a false confession that he killed the residents of a house near where he was working. In a brief unsupervised moment, he escapes through a manhole and goes into hiding in a sewer. A series of allegorical, surrealistic set pieces ensues as Fred explores the nether reaches of a church, a real estate firm, and a jewelry store. Each stop is an opportunity for Wright to explore themes of hope, greed, and exploitation; the real estate firm, Wright notes, “collected hundreds of thousands of dollars in rent from poor colored folks.” But Fred’s deepening existential crisis and growing distance from society keep the scenes from feeling like potted commentaries. As he wallpapers his underground warren with cash, mocking and invalidating the currency, he registers a surrealistic but engrossing protest against divisive social norms. The novel, rejected by Wright’s publisher, has only appeared as a substantially truncated short story until now, without the opening setup and with a different ending. Wright's take on racial injustice seems to have unsettled his publisher: A note reveals that an editor found reading about Fred’s treatment by the police “unbearable.” That may explain why Wright, in an essay included here, says its focus on race is “rather muted,” emphasizing broader existential themes. Regardless, as an afterword by Wright’s grandson Malcolm attests, the story now serves as an allegory both of Wright (he moved to France, an “exile beyond the reach of Jim Crow and American bigotry”) and American life. Today, it resonates deeply as a story about race and the struggle to envision a different, better world.
A welcome literary resurrection that deserves a place alongside Wright’s best-known work.Pub Date: April 20, 2021
ISBN: 978-1-59853-676-8
Page Count: 240
Publisher: Library of America
Review Posted Online: March 16, 2021
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2021
BOOK TO SCREEN
Uneven but fitfully amusing.
Betrayed by her husband, a severely depressed young woman gets drawn into the over-the-top festivities at a lavish wedding.
Phoebe Stone, who teaches English literature at a St. Louis college, is plotting her own demise. Her husband, Matt, has left her for another woman, and Phoebe is taking it hard. Indeed, she's determined just where and how she will end it all: at an oceanfront hotel in Newport, where she will lie on a king-sized canopy bed and take a bottle of her cat’s painkillers. At the hotel, Phoebe meets bride-to-be Lila, a headstrong rich girl presiding over her own extravagant six-day wedding celebration. Lila thought she had booked every room in the hotel, and learning of Phoebe's suicidal intentions, she forbids this stray guest from disrupting the nuptials: “No. You definitely can’t kill yourself. This is my wedding week.” After the punchy opening, a grim flashback to the meltdown of Phoebe's marriage temporarily darkens the mood, but things pick up when spoiled Lila interrupts Phoebe's preparations and sweeps her up in the wedding juggernaut. The slide from earnest drama to broad farce is somewhat jarring, but from this point on, Espach crafts an enjoyable—if overstuffed—comedy of manners. When the original maid of honor drops out, Phoebe is persuaded, against her better judgment, to take her place. There’s some fun to be had here: The wedding party—including groom-to-be Gary, a widower, and his 11-year-old daughter—takes surfing lessons; the women in the group have a session with a Sex Woman. But it all goes on too long, and the humor can seem forced, reaching a low point when someone has sex with the vintage wedding car (you don’t want to know the details). Later, when two characters have a meet-cute in a hot tub, readers will guess exactly how the marriage plot resolves.
Uneven but fitfully amusing.Pub Date: July 30, 2024
ISBN: 9781250899576
Page Count: 384
Publisher: Henry Holt
Review Posted Online: Sept. 13, 2024
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