GIVE MY LOVE TO THE SAVAGES, stories in the key of Black (fantasy) life

GIVE MY LOVE TO THE SAVAGES: Stories
CHRIS STUCK
Amistad Books
$25.99 hardcover, available now

FINALIST FOR THE PEN/Robert W. Bingham Prize for Debut Short Story Collection! Winners announced on 28 February 2022.

Rating: 4* of five

The Publisher Says: A provocative and raw debut collection of short fiction reminiscent of Junot Diaz’s Drown.

A Black man’s life, told in scenes—through every time he’s been called nigger. A Black son who visits his estranged white father in Los Angeles just as the ’92 riots begin. A Black Republican, coping with a skin disease that has turned him white, is forced to reconsider his life. A young Black man, fetishized by an older white woman he’s just met, is offered a strange and tempting proposal.

The nine tales in Give My Love to the Savages illuminate the multifaceted Black experience, exploring the thorny intersections of race, identity, and Black life through an extraordinary cast of characters. From the absurd to the starkly realistic, these stories take aim at the ironies and contradictions of the American racial experience. Chris Stuck traverses the dividing lines, and attempts to create meaning from them in unique and unusual ways. Each story considers a marker of our current culture, from uprisings and sly and not-so-sly racism, to Black fetishization and conservatism, to the obstacles placed in front of Black masculinity and Black and interracial relationships by society and circumstance.

Setting these stories across America, from Los Angeles, Phoenix and the Pacific Northwest, to New York and Washington, DC, to the suburbs and small Midwestern towns, Stuck uses place to expose the absurdity of race and the odd ways that Black people and white people converge and retreat, rub against and bump into one another.

Ultimately, Give My Love to the Savages is the story of America. With biting humor and careful honesty, Stuck riffs on the dichotomy of love and barbarity—the yin and yang of racial experience—and the difficult and uncertain terrain Black Americans must navigate in pursuit of their desires.

I RECEIVED A DRC FROM THE PUBLISHER VIA NETGALLEY. THANK YOU.

My Review: I seriously doubted that I'd get deeply enmeshed in this book because Race. Such a stupid, racist thought...and so untrue in the end. I feel vindicated in continuing to prosecute my ongoing battle against the ossification of my brain. Why, I even read another YA book recently and y'all *know* how much I don't like teenagers. Even gay ones.

But this collection, now, this is the stuff I think I'll find every time I try something fresh. I am so often disappointed...not always the author's fault...that, when I find writers like Author Stuck I'm a little wary. "Is this the only one? Can and/or will he do more, get even better?" I'm hoping he can, and will, because a writer who looks at the world from his oddball angle is a deep pleasure to read.

I will, by long-established custom, use the Bryce Method of short, separate impressions and distinct individual ratings for the stories to come to a gestalt understanding of this debut collection.

Every Time They Call You Nigger uses the Satanic Second (person) for a chest-pokey yuck-ptui feel. Still:

"You like this because you now know the difference between Black people and niggas,the difference between niggers and niggas. You think you're a Jedi in understanding the code. Though you walk through the valley of the shadow of race, you will fear no evil."

But you will fear The Void...adulthood, with its hostages to fortune, comes to us all and gives us perspectives we never expected to get. We're all going to be in the struggle to make a future we can stand to leave behind. 4 stars

How to Be A Dick in the Twenty-First Century presents Richard Dickerson, fifty-something bald five-six Black billionaire, as his apotheosis into Dickhood is attained:

No matter the season, my entire body was always aroused, itchy, throbbing. That was my mentality, too. The testosterone, it was how I got ahead, my assertiveness, my swagger. As a man, it was expected of me. As a Black man, it was required.

This satirical take on end-stage capitalism via "Metamorphosis" made me chuckle a lot. No matter what one tries, has done or does, the fact is you're always you. For better or worse. 4.5 stars

Lake No Negro takes polyamory to the weird, domestic-drama cleaners...Andre's got a lot to prove, Tanya's got nothing to lose. The Senior Moments in that ménage are about to get dramatically more Fraught. Kind of fun...pretty seriously slight. 3 stars

And Then There Were the Norrises contains the multitudes of a gay twelve-year-old kid (called "Chuck" for fuck sake!) in WITSEC with a depressingly dysfunctional pair of "parents" and a bad habit of being way, way too smart:

By then, my mother was the only one in the family who would speak to me in civil tones. At dinner that night, she asked if I'd met anyone at school. Before I could answer, my older sister, Trudy, muttered, "highly unlikely, Mother," in her little look-at-me, I-suddenly-have-boobs way.

But in fact, and not for the first time, Love blooms with a low-class no-count white kid named Sterling Silver. Who probably saved the kid's life by introducing him to normal-boy shit. When you're twelve, three months changes the world. Sad, also really funny, and very, very 1980s. 4 stars

Cowboys doesn't make you long for the Good Old Days of being midtwenties and middlin' stupid on the sauce. But gettin' a job at the Waxsonian Museum, owned by Dick Doberman the Vietnamese refugee made good enough to keep the doors of the place open? THEN, listen to this!, THEN lettin' your loser cracker co-worker talk you into helping his brother the bail bondsman collar a skiptrace wanted for felony grand theft...yeah. That's where we're headed. Funny, grisly, just stinkin' awful. 4 stars

Chuck and Tina Go On Vacation doesn't break new ground, but does remind us that we're all alive even when we're not Living.

Chuck hit the Book It Now button and saw the final price. Really, it wasn't that bad. But all he could think was their next credit card bill, and their student loans. Their balances were up there, a frothy wave of already-spent cash cresting over their heads.

It's just that there's no way to keep score, they aren't tethered to any one or thing, not even each other really...when Chuck gets so sick he longs for death and Tina gets so high she can't remember why she cared what anyone thought (but don't tell Chuck!) they still fail to be together. Not even when their social-media lameness results in a back-home disaster. It's like Marla, Tina's "friend" says after scoffing at her tears: "Girl, this is New York. Either move or stop crying." This is not Tina's world, and Chuck doesn't even belong in this one still less the one she belongs in...in her dreams. 4 stars because it's The Little Horses of Tarquinia only Black and in Mexico.

This Isn't Music uses the Satanic Second again, gawd how I hate having my chest poked! and also gets Nick and Lily to cross several Black-plus-white lines...he says he's her Mandingo! And she doesn't file for divorce from her phone!...and then they relapse into intimate apathy with his dementia-addled father. Or they will, you can bet, after he sorta-kinda ends his, what is it?, not so much affair as too-good-friendship with fellow white-on-Black sufferer Billie. Whose white is Tyrone (not Black, Irish!), who doesn't want to fuck anymore because...well, if what happened to him had happened to me I'd never so much as undress in front of anyone ever again. And still...there's the Big Nothing at the center of this Life that barely feels alive inside, "Know this: No matter how much you hate it, this is your life," Nick. I was enrapt. I read bits to my Young (mixed race) Gentleman Caller, and watched him furrow his brow.... 4.5 stars

The Life and Loves of Melvin J. Plump, Esq. showed me my ugliest self, and my worst self, but by gawd I will be damned if I'll be identified with a rotten-souled Repulsivecan!

{The therapist} deflated with one of her nose-whistling sighs. "And just what kind of people are they?"
"You know, sun visors and fanny packs, socks and sandals. The true soul of America."
–and–
The vessel was Vegas and the Mall of America but with a rudder and lifeboats. And I kept wondering how the behemoth didn't sink.

(I myownself quietly wondered "why" as well....) See? That's how these stories get to you. Sneakily. With stealth. In pieces and by increments. 5 stars

Give My Love to the Savages means, basically, exactly what you think it should mean. Junie, a twenty-year-old slacker without any discernible sense of self-worth, comes to Los Angeles to spend spring break with his shyster father, the used-car magnate. The catch is, it's the Rodney King Uprising of 1992 and there is a giant fire taking the space LA usually leaves for its nasty racism.

As an interracial-marriage kid, he's got no fixed identity and the Great Urge Downward to atone for the rotten hate crime he did nothing to stop. His white father, a narcissistic user, accidentally...irresponsibly...puts him in the right place to really hit the loud pedal on his psycho-social slide. 4 stars

Maybe it's the fact that I knew his editor long, long ago (hi Tracy!); maybe it's my inability to pass up writers whose taste and talent is for grit lit, Negro Noir, the potholes-and-passions writers...this is a debut I really want to see get more book-siblings.