GREENLAND, debut QUILTBAG novel about Blackness meeting Queerness

GREENLAND
DAVID SANTOS DONALDSON
Amistad
$26.99 hardcover, available now

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

Rating: 4.25* of five

The Publisher Says: A dazzling, debut novel-within-a-novel in the vein of The Prophets and Memorial, about a young author writing about the secret love affair between E.M. Forster and Mohammed el Adl—in which Mohammed's story collides with his own, blending fact and fiction.

In 1919, Mohammed el Adl, the young Egyptian lover of British author E. M. Forster, spent six months in a jail cell. A century later, Kip Starling has locked himself in his Brooklyn basement study with a pistol and twenty-one gallons of Poland Spring to write Mohammed's story.

Kip has only three weeks until his publisher's deadline to immerse himself in the mind of Mohammed who, like Kip, is Black, queer, an Other. The similarities don't end there. Both of their lives have been deeply affected by their confrontations with Whiteness, homophobia, their upper crust education, and their white romantic partners. As Kip immerses himself in his writing, Mohammed's story—and then Mohammed himself—begins to speak to him, and his life becomes a Proustian portal into Kip's own memories and psyche. Greenland seamlessly conjures two distinct yet overlapping worlds where the past mirrors the present, and the artist's journey transforms into a quest for truth that offers a world of possibility.

Electric and unforgettable, David Santos Donaldson's tour de force excavates the dream of white assimilation, the foibles of interracial relationships, and not only the legacy of a literary giant, but literature itself.

I RECEIVED THIS DRC FROM THE PUBLISHER VIA EDELWEISS+. THANK YOU.

My Review: I don't think anyone on Earth could've wanted to love this book more than I did. I'm in an intergenerational Black/white gay relationship. I am the very epitome of this debut novel's audience!

And here's the four-plus-star review to tell you why; and where it fell short for me.

Start with the pace. Kip(ling, as in the white Empire apologist) is Black, his lover...a strange hybrid of presence and absence...is white. Kip's main focus in the novel he needs to write in three weeks to meet his deadline is E.M. Forster's Black Egyptian lover, Mohammed's, treacherous path to being with an older white man. That needs set-up...but almost the first quarter of the book? It was drawn-out and in view of the excitement potential of this tale of discovery and personal growth through identification with Otherness, sapped the energy out of the tale for this reader.

Next, the sexuality...I am a lifelong admirer of and votary to the phallus, but good gravy, the erections and the spontaneous orgasms in here are, um, over the top. You should forgive. I'm also, as a survivor of maternal incest, permaybehaps a bit oversensitive to the juxtaposition of sexuality and those who really should be too young for such to occur to them. I accept, though, that this isn't done by the author for a lascivious purpose but as a fact of a certain kind of life. Still squicked me out.

But the core, the beating heart of the book, is the quest to be one's own power, to set one's own course, when Black and Other. Ben (Kip's lover) wants badly to be supportive, yet can't help but be a force for assimilation. No one white can help that. It's a fact of racist society...that we exist in our priviliege is enough for us to exert metaphysical gravity towards that end. The fact that Mohammed is in love with a man of great public eminence means he's under even greater assimilationist pressures. And let's face it, the assimilation can never be complete or seamless. One's skin color is not subject to change.

Kip's literary efforts are to deliver an acceptable manuscript. To a publisher, white. Who might, or might not, care to read, sign, publish his work...he has to do this. And he's got his companion, Mohammed, in his semblance of ever-increasing corporeality, as a guide, a distraction, a hectoring nuisance of a muse. Upstairs, he's got his loving, exasperated, uncomprehending white lover Ben.

This is the way we're going to go...through the hard, scary, fiercely fought battlefields of love and relationship and the deep dependence we all have on the illusion of the world we carry in our heads. Ben's illusions about marriage to the creative and exciting Kip didn't include the hard, slogging reality of living with a writer's frequent descents into insanity. Kip's fantasy of the way white privilege works was that it was transitive, like so many other senses of the verb "to fuck". One of them, dear Kip, is "to fuck over" and that is what Kip's fears and senses are telling him is happening. His embodied Blackness in Mohammed, the muse and weirdly corporeal fantasy, is there to tell him how getting fucked is only fun if it's not "over," and that's what the white men they truly love are inevitably going to do.

Well, there's something in that...there's no relationship that has perfect parity of partners, and there's a lot fewer relationships that have both Black and white men in them that get too close to that fantasy of parity. It's a tough enough thing to get the whole world's ideas about men in love with each other..."who's the woman? is what they say about Black men true?"...out of your bed, then you've got to get it out of your head. That's where things just crash for most people I've known who are in these relationships. Ben and Kip are separated by the powerful pull of ease.

Ben's crash comes while Kip's at his most vulnerable, and his most destructive. Ben looks into the void of Kip's unfillable maw of need, validation and identity and control and power and acceptance and love, and realizes "I can't do that...I can't be that." This being the nature of intimate relationships, Kip simply stalls out when he is Seen and abandoned on the existential level by the man he wanted to save him. Mohammed, the fantasy of Blackness and betrayed Otherness, and Kip have to make a run for it, or else be consumed into invisibiliy.

These struggles are, I suppose it pays to say out loud here, basic human ones. They're not different for different people, no matter their manifold other oppositions. What they represent is the endless, victoryless battle to be better at being yourself in a world that does not care in the tiniest degree about you. And what Kip must do is see that battle through. What makes his battle relatable, we've established in its basics. What makes it unique is Kip's thriving, driving need to create. And Ben? He isn't there in that battle. So Kip's on the field by himself. With Mohammed's fantastical, corporeal shade. That betrayed and abandoned, bitterly wounded, foully abused Black body is what Kip's life needs to incorporate because it is the very center of his Jungian Selfness.

The final scenes of Greenland, taking place with Black men in cold, searing whiteness, are some of the most profound explications of the Union of the Self I've ever read. And, faithful to Chekhov's gun rule, the ending of the novel is the end. The true end.

Remember, though, that all endings are also beginnings.

THE TALENTED RIBKINS, Hubbard's debut novel & THE RIB KING, its prequel...very interesting!

THE RIB KING
LADEE HUBBARD
Amistad (non-affiliate Amazon link)
$11.99 Kindle edition, available now

Rating: 4* of five...truly on sentimental grounds

A BOOKRIOT BEST BOOK OF 2021!

The Publisher Says: Upstairs, Downstairs meets Parasite: The acclaimed author of The Talented Ribkins deconstructs painful African American stereotypes and offers a fresh and searing critique on race, class, privilege, ambition, exploitation, and the seeds of rage in America in this intricately woven and masterfully executed historical novel, set in the early twentieth century that centers around the black servants of a down-on-its heels upper-class white family.

For fifteen years August Sitwell has worked for the Barclays, a well-to-do white family who plucked him from an orphan asylum and gave him a job. The groundskeeper is part of the household’s all-black staff, along with “Miss Mamie,” the talented cook, pretty new maid Jennie Williams, and three young kitchen apprentices—the latest orphan boys Mr. Barclay has taken in to "civilize" boys like August.

But the Barclays' fortunes have fallen, and their money is almost gone. When a prospective business associate proposes selling Miss Mamie’s delicious rib sauce to local markets under the brand name “The Rib King”—using a caricature of a wildly grinning August wearing a jewel-encrusted crown on the label—Mr. Barclay, desperate for cash, agrees. Yet neither Miss Mamie nor August will see a dime. Humiliated, August grows increasingly distraught, his anger building to a rage that explodes in shocking tragedy.

Elegantly written and exhaustively researched, The Rib King is an unsparing examination of America’s fascination with black iconography and exploitation that redefines African American stereotypes in literature. In this powerful, disturbing, and timely novel, Ladee Hubbard reveals who people actually are, and most importantly, who and what they are not.

I RECEIVED THIS AS A YULE GIFT FROM MY DELIGHTFUL YOUNG GENTLEMAN CALLER. YOU'RE TOO KIND, ROB.

My Review: A book of two halves...Mr. Sitwell, the risen-through-the-ranks butler of the Barclay family, has a fascinating tale to tell about how he becomes The Rib King™ and, in an access of passionate rage, pivots from a man who knows his worth, and protects it at all costs, into a, well, talented person set on revenge for some nasty wrongs. I myownself was quite invested in this story and would give it four stars were it the only one here.

Part two follows Jennie, who was another servant in the Barclay household, as she does what needs doing in New Orleans. She has a daughter and she is the only one who can look out for the young lady's future. This would seem to be well-trodden territory. It is. I don't want you to think there was nothing to say for it, and there are definitely reasons to follow Jennie and her child. But the process was three-star territory for sure.

What made me think and fuss about how to fix this reading experience in my memory is the fact that I read The Talented Ribkins (see below) before I read this book. It led me down the garden path a bit. I was expecting to get more of the reasons and the wherefores of the earlier book's characters. It didn't really fulfill that desire in me.

But the prose flowed over my eyes, the stories felt very *real* in their outlines and very relatable to the world we saw in The Talented Ribkins; so surely four stars, after all? And that, plus the verve of Mr. Sitwell's half of the story, gave me the nudge to go from the more-grounded-in-the-object three-and-a-half up to four stars.

I got four stars'-worth of pleasure from Ladee Hubbard's unique and entertaining characters. I expect most who read my reviews will, too. I do caution y'all to get and read The Talented Ribkins first. They make a better whole-story experience that way, and they're each well worth your eyeblinks.


+++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++

THE TALENTED RIBKINS
LADEE HUBBARD
Melville House
$13.99 Kindle edition, available now

Rating: 4* of five...but barely...when it should've been five

WINNER OF THE 2018 Hurston/Wright Legacy Award for Debut Novel

The Publisher Says: At seventy-two, Johnny Ribkins shouldn’t have such problems: He’s got one week to come up with the money he stole from his mobster boss or it’s curtains.

What may or may not be useful to Johnny as he flees is that he comes from an African-American family that has been gifted with super powers that are a bit, well, odd. Okay, very odd. For example, Johnny's father could see colors no one else could see. His brother could scale perfectly flat walls. His cousin belches fire. And Johnny himself can make precise maps of any space you name, whether he's been there or not.

In the old days, the Ribkins family tried to apply their gifts to the civil rights effort, calling themselves The Justice Committee. But when their, eh, superpowers proved insufficient, the group fell apart. Out of frustration Johnny and his brother used their talents to stage a series of burglaries, each more daring than the last.

Fast forward a couple decades and Johnny’s on a race against the clock to dig up loot he's stashed all over Florida. His brother is gone, but he has an unexpected sidekick: his brother's daughter, Eloise, who has a special superpower of her own.

Inspired by W. E. B. Du Bois’s famous essay “The Talented Tenth” and fuelled by Ladee Hubbard’s marvelously original imagination, The Talented Ribkins is a big-hearted debut novel about race, class, politics, and the unique gifts that, while they may cause some problems from time to time, bind a family together.

A big-hearted novel about a family with special gifts who sometimes stumble in their efforts to succeed in life, The Talented Ribkins draws on such novels as Toni Morrison’s Sula and Colson Whitehead's The Intuitionist to weave themes of race, class, and politics into a wonderfully accomplished and engaging novel.

THIS WAS A YULE GIFT TO ME FROM MY DELIGHTFUL YOUNG GENTLEMAN CALLER. YOU ROCK, ROB!

My Review: First, read this:

“Johnny Ribkins, there was a time when you could've been anything you wanted to be, a doctor, lawyer or an Indian chief...instead all you are is a damn shame.”
–and–
"It’s not your job to try and compensate other people’s lack of vision. You’ve got enough to do just trying to be true to your own."

I'm not sure what you like in terms of first novels. I hope you're willing to run around on your usual genres with a superhero-adjacent tale of the, um, strange descendents of the yahoo who lost the rights to The Rib King™—the miracle delicious barbecue sauce of all time. Johnny Ribkins is the dishonest remaining scion of the line that's made its business to get in on that amazing concoction, rightfully theirs.

But Johnny and his line were, if not superpowered, at the least gifted in some peculiar ways other mortals aren't. He, for example, can map places. And they don't have to be real yet. His maps enable him to, when his time aiding "the Justice Committee" during the 1960s Civil Rights struggle (and sinful wicked shame on our country for allowing it to be dismantled while we watch), use his unique talent to hide in undiscoverable places the money he just knows he will need in the future. (Don't expect to go too deep into how and why that should be...it's not a huge piece of this book.)

Now that he's got the need for his funds, he and his teenaged niece (with a really, really cool "talent" that utterly eludes me, personally) travel from pillar to post together literally digging the future out of the muck and dirt of the past, while he shares with his brother's daughter all the stuff he wishes he'd said, the people he knew and their effects on him and the world, with the family's latest and last survivor.

So, that four star rating up there? That's all about the Ribkins not really getting into it, about the told-not-lived nature of a reflection and road novel. It isn't bad, it's got lovely sentences that say a lot about what it means to be Othered among others, and how very sad it is to leave so few things other people care about behind for them to enjoy.

But as a first novel being the same as a first at-bat, it swings for the fences and gets an RBI though not a home run. That's still a hell of an achievement.

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.