Simeon Marsalis

A beautifully told, relentlessly uncompromising, frequently funny and ultimately unsettling story about a young Black man trying to define his own selfhood while at the same time immersing himself in a white-white culture.

The storytelling is fragmentary and at times frustratingly oblique. It reminded me somewhat of Tom McCarthy's Remainder, which is saying something, because McCarthy's novel is written from the perspective of a man with severe brain damage who is trying and failing to make sense of the world, whereas this novel's protagonist is highly sensitive and intelligent and observant and talented, but is surrounded by white people who frequently behave in baffling ways to him. The actions of those around him (and their reaction to his simple existence as a black man) are nearly as incomprehensible to him as McCarthy's protagonist finds the people in his world. In both novels the first-person narrators try to make sense of their experiences by cataloguing their surroundings in minute detail. In both cases their observations are so unusual and so limited that the effect is one of extreme isolation and disorientation.

This writing is far more multivalent than McCarthy's, though. It is richer and more intellectual. There is so much going on in terms of history and identity. On nearly every page a sentence would come along that would make me gasp and laugh at the same time, a little implosion of surprise and delight that felt a little like being socked metaphorically in the gut.

This novel has no guideposts. It doesn't explain itself. I enjoyed this aspect very much and didn't mind whether my interpretations might have been unintended by the author or not. To enjoy the novel requires quite a lot of willingness to be not quite sure what to think about it as you read along. The scrupulous details--the oddness of events and observations made--carried me completely past the need to ground my understandings in a consistenly plausible, if fictional, reality. The degree to which you enjoy not having everything laid out for you as a reader is a good measure for how much you will enjoy it.… (més)

David is a freshman at University of Vermont, where he is one of the very few African American students. He struggles to figure out how he fits in as a student and as a black man. He is also missing his girlfriend from New York. The relationship was more physical than anything else, but started on the lie: he didn’t think that sounded black enough that he was from Long Island, so he lied and said he was from Harlem. Throughout the whole story, while he’s trying to decipher is place in the world, he is also remarkably focused on both American architectural design and Harlem Renaissance writer Jean Toomer.
The story is told mostly through journal entries, but also through excerpts from a novel David is working on. As the novel is based on events in his own life, we often get to see the reality as he describes it in his journal as well as the version he’d like to show the world. Sometimes it seems as though David isn’t really sure which is which. Anyone interested in coming of age stories or of reading about someone come to terms with their own reality, will enjoy this book.… (més)