DEVIL IS FINE, latest from bitter, amazing John Vercher

DEVIL IS FINE
JOHN VERCHER
Celadon Books
$28.99 hardcover, available now

Rating: 4.5* of five

The Publisher Says: Still reeling from a sudden tragedy, our biracial narrator receives a letter from an attorney: he has just inherited a plot of land from his estranged white grandfather. He travels to a beach town several hours south of his home with the intention of selling the land immediately and moving on. But upon inspection, what lies beneath the dirt is far more complicated than he ever imagined. In a shocking irony, he is now the Black owner of a former plantation passed down by the men on his white mother’s side of the family.

Vercher deftly blurs the lines between real and imagined, past and present, tragedy and humor, and fathers and sons in this story of discovering and reclaiming a painful past. With the wit and rawness of Paul Beatty’s The Sellout, Devil Is Fine is a gripping, surreal, and brilliantly crafted dissection of the legacies we leave behind and those we inherit.

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

My Review: The first book I reviwed by Author Vercher was After the Lights Go Out, a tough, unflinching look at the way one biracial man navigates a life whose deck is stacked against him as he determinedly struggles for Better.

Not so our unnamed stream-of-consciousness narrator. He's subsided into a haze of addiction, numbing the rejection of US society, his family of origin, and himself. He does not manage his pain, he tries to outrun it. This is, as anyone who has ever entered therapy knows, pointless and causes far more problems than it solves.

Be that as it may, here we are as the novel opens on the one disaster any parent dreads the most: the death of his son, a teenager, is unsurprisingly a shock to his system. His white mother's father, a stranger to him (for the most part) died and left a landholding...a plantation...to his son. After the unbearable horror of his son's funeral, he discovers he's a landowner for the first time in his life.

When he goes to the property to get the train moving on the process of selling it to be developed, ending at last his lifetime of (largely self-inflicted) poverty, things get weird. Like, "am I hallucinating?" weird. The language used in the synopsis above, "blurs the lines between real and imagined," is very carefully chosen. I like magical realism, and am resolutely a materialist, but the eerie, spooky things that happen in the corner of one's eye, and juuust out of sight, aren't unreal necessarily. After all, if the brain does in fact create reality from the bouncing of photons and the resistance of electrons to merging, there's nothing to say ghost or spirits or other such "hallucinations" are not real.

Our narrator's derangement from this latest helping of grief, added to his borning acknowlefgment of harms he's caused via addiction behaviors, is entirely enough to explain his altered perceptions of the material world. The good news for him is these spirits or whatever are guiding him onto a path of redemption. The bad news is he's going to forego a lot of money.

Redemption, to the degree it is possible, is worth a lot more than money. That our man is on that path at last makes this a very satisfying read indeed.

I was less impressed by the author's approach to stream-of-consciousness storytelling here. I followed, I think, most of the shifts in narrative. The key is "I think". I'm a savvy, experienced old reader, who loves him some Virginia Woolf; and yet I was left wondering if I was following every change. That's not a good sign that the author's got the material entirely under his control. I'm happy to pay it forward and occasionally do a re-visit of a paragraph once in a way, but it happened a lot. That's why this isn't a five-star review.

The story told ends up getting all the stars; the storytelling was a very slight bit less than perfectly aligned wiith it. On balance, though, a strong positive on getting yourself a copy.

Just maybe from the library.