THE FANTASIES OF FUTURE THINGS, a lovely story of discovering your true self

THE FANTASIES OF FUTURE THINGS
DOUG JONES
Simon & Schuster (non-affiliate Amazon link)
$14.99 ebook, available now

Rating: 4.5* of five

The Publisher Says: A compelling and timely debut novel following two Black men tasked with overseeing the destruction and gentrification of the predominantly Black neighborhoods surrounding Atlanta during the 1996 Olympics.

The Fantasies of Future Things follows two Black men working for the real estate development company responsible for the revitalization of Summerhill in Atlanta, Georgia, for the 1996 Olympics. But Summerhill is a predominantly Black neighborhood, and real estate agents Jacob and Daniel know that “revitalization” is code for “gentrification”—which means they will be tasked with displacing people from their own community.

Brooklyn-born Jacob, a recent Morehouse graduate, is armed with the hopes of his parents and has big dreams about the life he should be living. Daniel, a native of Atlanta, is tired, angry, and disillusioned with his career and ready for a change. While different in many ways, Jacob and Daniel are coming to grips with many of the same accepting their sexuality, dealing with the pressures of family, wrestling with the conflicting morality of their jobs, and coping with the daily trauma that comes with being Black in America. As we follow the parallel journeys of these two men, and in the face of towering obstacles, Jacob and Daniel must decide what they are willing to do for themselves and for their communities.

This lacerating, bold, and moving novel deftly explores our need for intimacy and the harm of internalized homophobia, the relationships Black men have with family and each other, and the restrictive masculinity so often required of them.

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

My Review: The 1990s are very recent, right? What do you mean, thirty years ago?! Thirty years ago it was 1966!

I need a lie-down.

So that trauma being delivered to my undeserving psyche, I set about reading this book in an existential crisis mode, which turned out to suit the read down to the ground. Jacob and Daniel are pursuing dreams that they've bought into but did not create, do not trust, and can not break free of. The price of the men getting what they were ambivalently pursuing is the meat of this story.

I'm rootin' for this book to succeed from the off, is my point. I think the exploration of what a man will do to survive versus what does that man need, want, and desire to make his survival into a life is what makes a story one that stands out from the crowd. Jacob's Morehouse degree and the weight of his Brooklyn-originated family's desire for him to continue the bougie life and style they love is at variance with his lived experience working to "gentrify" a living community away from its residents. Daniel's more local experience as a fatherless boy coming to manhood in Atlanta is rooted in a life more like that of the people the two men are displacing. While both men are striving to make lives defining themselves as materially successful, the cost in honesty about themselves, and in the acceptance of the shady tactics of the developers, is bitterly poignant.

Daniel and Jacob are well-rounded characters. They felt to my reading eyes like people I could pick out on a street. I was fully convinced when Daniel got a lead on his father's identity at the choice he made sprang from a real person's heart and mind. Jacob's entanglement with social-worker Sherman and its soul-awakening consequences also felt as though it was something I heard from Jacob's actual lips. I was that enmeshed in this story's reality, and was disappointed when I had to come out of it.

I don't imagine a lot of readers will like the slightly pat resolution. I don't think it was necessarily the best possible way to end this story. I did feel it had the honesty to bring closure to the plot. Would a slightly more open-ended resolution have gained it a full fifth star? Yes. But this is a complete story, one that does a lot of honest and unflinching soul-searching among its characters, and that matters a lot.

Four and a half stars for its loevely sentences, and its loving soul searching truth-telling ways.

THE TOWN OF BABYLON, coming-of-(middle)-age story set in familiar suburbia

THE TOWN OF BABYLON
ALEJANDRO VARELA
Astra House
$27.00 hardcover, available now

Shortlisted for the 2022 National Book Award for Fiction! Awards will be presented on 16 November 2022.

Rating: 4* of five

The Publisher Says: In this contemporary debut novel—an intimate portrait of queer, racial, and class identity —Andrés, a gay Latinx professor, returns to his suburban hometown in the wake of his husband’s infidelity. There he finds himself with no excuse not to attend his twenty-year high school reunion, and hesitantly begins to reconnect with people he used to call friends.

Over the next few weeks, while caring for his aging parents and navigating the neighborhood where he grew up, Andrés falls into old habits with friends he thought he’d left behind. Before long, he unexpectedly becomes entangled with his first love and is forced to tend to past wounds.

Captivating and poignant; a modern coming-of-age story about the essential nature of community, The Town of Babylon is a page-turning novel about young love and a close examination of our social systems and the toll they take when they fail us.

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

My Review: This is a debut novel.

I wanted to get that out there now, because while it's not perfect...it was going to be a three-and-a-half-star read until a certain point...it's got the extra insight and clarity to lift the read to the next level. A polyphonic novel that travels back and forth between the 1990s, when Andrés left Babylon, and now, when his return is less an actual return than a retreat from the mess in his present-day life enabled by his sudden discovery that his mother needs help caring for his gravely ill father.

Andrés is a first-generation American, his parents immigrants whose relationship to the USA is fraught with the usual complexities and exacerbated by their closeted-but-clearly-queer son. His unhappiness, his entire life being spent trying to hide and not to call attention to himself, impacted them...but we're not really, despite the set-up, here for them. And that would've made things a lot more agreeable to me had we been let into that experience...but that isn't Andrés's story to tell. So, no sense blaming the story for not delivering something it didn't promise me.

As Andrés spends time with the awful US health-care system, he also decides whether his marital issues might be contextualized by a trip to his twentieth high-school reunion. (I've never been to a high-school reunion...leaving that place was a joy, going back seems perverse.) It's here that I begin to think, "oh boy, here we go down Bad-Memory Lane" and I was vindicated. A homophobe that Andrés strongly suspects was involved in an act of lethal anti-gay violence? A preacher now! His first love? Married with children! Tick, tick, tick as the expected dominoes fall. What saves the story is the anti-capitalist anger of it:

The suburbs are where people go to preserve their ignorance, in service of a delusion they've mistaken for a dream. They tired of the more interesting human experiment and fled. Cowards, the lot. Working class, middle class, and one-percenters alike.
–and–
There are places in this world where people worry less intensely and with less frequency. Places where the hierarchy isn't stretched tall and people aren't perched high above their loved ones. Egalitarian places, where families don't have to be self-contained battalions constantly defending against their neighbors and other strangers. But not here.

I completely concur. I, in fact, would go far more into the area...which is why we're reading Author Varela's book, not mine. It's a very interesting story for the middle-aged multitudes, this review of the past to come to some peace with the present. But honestly, I'm past middle age and I was getting more than a little antsy with a storytelling technique that I myownself feel works best in stories about younger people, eg The Prophets.

Then I read this:

Going home makes it impossible to forget the past, but it also ushers the past into the present, reconstructing it, making it easier to face.

And the view snapped into focus, I added that half-star back, and am recommending the read to you whole-heartedly.

YOUNG MUNGO, second three-hankie weepie novel from Douglas Stuart

YOUNG MUNGO
DOUGLAS STUART
Grove Press
$27.00 hardcover, available now

One of NPR's Best Books of 2022!

One of Time Magazine's 100 Must-Read Books of 2022

LISTEN TO THE AUTHOR DISCUSS HIS BOOK!

LONGLISTED for the 2023 Andrew Carnegie Medal for Excellence in Fiction!


Rating: 5* of five

The Publisher Says: A story of queer love and working-class families, Young Mungo is the brilliant second novel from the Booker Prize-winning author of Shuggie Bain.

Douglas Stuart's first novel Shuggie Bain, winner of the 2020 Booker Prize, is one of the most successful literary debuts of the century so far. Published or forthcoming in forty territories, it has sold more than one million copies worldwide. Now Stuart returns with Young Mungo, his extraordinary second novel. Both a page-turner and literary tour de force, it is a vivid portrayal of working-class life and a deeply moving and highly suspenseful story of the dangerous first love of two young men.

Growing up in a housing estate in Glasgow, Mungo and James are born under different stars—Mungo a Protestant and James a Catholic—and they should be sworn enemies if they're to be seen as men at all. Yet against all odds, they become best friends as they find a sanctuary in the pigeon dovecote that James has built for his prize racing birds. As they fall in love, they dream of finding somewhere they belong, while Mungo works hard to hide his true self from all those around him, especially from his big brother Hamish, a local gang leader with a brutal reputation to uphold. And when several months later Mungo's mother sends him on a fishing trip to a loch in Western Scotland with two strange men whose drunken banter belies murky pasts, he will need to summon all his inner strength and courage to try to get back to a place of safety, a place where he and James might still have a future.

Imbuing the everyday world of its characters with rich lyricism and giving full voice to people rarely acknowledged in the literary world, Young Mungo is a gripping and revealing story about the bounds of masculinity, the divisions of sectarianism, the violence faced by many queer people, and the dangers of loving someone too much.

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

My Review: I want to address something that's been bothering me a lot to start off this review:

There. I've said it. I stand by it. Adjust your seatbelts, laddies and gentlewomen, and listen up.

Mungo's a teenager with a truly evil, selfish alcoholic mother, a violent, should-be-imprisoned brother, and a sweet but misguided, loving but naïve sister, and a serious tic gifted to him by his unaddressed, undiagnosed neurodivergence. His life isn't one tiny bit of fun, and unlike Shuggie in Author Stuart's first book, he doesn't have a love object in his entire life. He loves his sister and she loves him, but that's a little like the lame helping the halt. Shuggie was entirely absorbed in loving his mother, but Mungo seldom sees his and when he does, it's usually better for him not to spend much time in her toxic terrible black hole of a presence. Being a neurodivergent person, Mungo fixates on his too-young, too-broken mother for whatever guideposts she can offer; she sucks the whole of his lovingkindness down like her genuine love, fortified wine, and gives none back. So he knows, at least seems to know, she isn't a model he can follow. His sister does the best she can to fill the kindness void, but she's barely older than Mungo by the calendar. She's gotten out of a bad jam, and come to know she can't live in this world...meaning she has to leave Mungo behind. Hamish? All Hamish does, all he knows, is rage and violence. There will be nothing else left in Mungo's life...no other emotional reality.

This, then, isn't Shuggie Redux. Stop pretending it is. Yes, it's set in deindustrializing Glasgow. Yes, it takes place in the working class parts of that world. Alcoholic parent, abusive sibling, all there...but the meat of this story is Mungo, and therefore this story could not be less like the family that slips away from Shuggie, that he just...loses...no fault of his own. The one good thing, as he tells himself (and with which I agree) is that he has is the love he bears for and gets from the Catholic boy who lives near him: James. James, son of a cancer-taken mother, an oil-rig worker father, and in love with Mungo. Who, need I mention, loves James right back. They explore their teenaged awkward bodies, they try to figure out the HUGE new emotions, and they face up to the impossibility of being openly gay in their world. Hamish? He'll kill Mungo; James's father's already had a go at killing him for it. James, older by almost a year, is the one who has to bear the public brunt of their inevitable discovery...Mungo just can't.

Not to say Mungo's not hapless and helpless. He's simply clueless, he lacks a kind of inner compass that warns a person away from impulsive action. In the end, it causes a world of trouble for him, and all of it is his mother's fault. She wants to be alone, to get her funtimes with a new man, so off she packs Mungo (freshly beaten by Hamish for the James-loving faggot that he is) off with...strangers, basically. And that goes epically badly for Mungo. He can think of nothing, no way out of his terrible situation. He's got nothing except what he's seen, what's surrounded him his whole life when Life, the great existential crisis that is Life, crashes down on him. That it is a test is clear; how he responds to the test isn't obviously the way he would have even a day before it came upon him. Mungo makes his whole life anew when he absolutely can do nothing except react, respond to the great crisis.

It is harsh, ugly, and frightening, and it comes from events so hideous that I was sure I would lose my rag and start screaming incoherently at the Kindle. And it was, in this reader's angry, bitter judgment, the only and the best way he could have behaved. It was a boy, cooked in a bath of rage, becoming the only man that bath dissolved the fatty, weakening childness off of him to be.

There is a scene at the very end of the book, a moment, a thing we're not expecting. It is, of course, Author Stuart's last word. He wrote this book, this harsh and unyielding and rageful story, the way he wrote Shuggie Bain: without mercy. It was the perfect ending. And this was the best way he could possibly have followed that book up: darkness has shadows, too.