PLEASANTVIEW, multiple prize-winning Trinidadian story-novel

PLEASANTVIEW: A Novel in Stories
CELESTE MOHAMMED
Ig Publishing
$16.95 trade paper, available now

Rating: 4* of five

THE 2022 OCM BOCAS PRIZE FICTION WINNER!

2022 FIRECRACKER AWARD for FICTION WINNER!

The Publisher Says: Coconut trees. Carnival. Rum and coke. To many outsiders, these idyllic images represent the supposed easy life in Caribbean nations such as Trinidad and Tobago. However, the reality is far different for those who live there—a society where poverty and patriarchy savagely rule, and where love and revenge often go hand in hand.

Written in a combination of English and Trinidad Creole, Pleasantview reveals the dark side of the Caribbean dream. In this novel-in-stories about a fictional town in Trinidad, we meet a political candidate who sets out to slaughter endangered turtles for fun, while his rival candidate beats his “outside-woman,” so badly she ends up losing their baby. On the night of a political rally, the abused woman exacts a very public revenge, the trajectory of which echoes through Pleasantview, ending with one boy introducing another boy to a gun and to an ideology which will help him aim the weapon.

Merging the beauty and brutality of Trinidadian culture evoked by writers such as Ingrid Persaud and Claire Adam with the linguistic experimentation of Marlon James’s A Brief History of Seven Killings, Pleasantview is a landmark work from an important new voice in international literary fiction.

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

My Review: PLEASANTVIEW is a mixed-idiom collection of Trinidadian fictions that's come in for a heaping helping of praise and prizes...albeit from very literary sources...was my next foray (after If I Survive You) into Caribbean-inflected English-language storytelling. What a dramatic difference between the two projects.

Where Escoffery's Booker-nominated Jamaican-American work was firmly set in the US, this delightful braid of nine stories is emphatically not about, for, or inclusive of US sensibilities. For this reader, that is a feature not a bug. While Author Mohammed does maintain Standard English spellings throughout the book, her inflections and emphases are decidedly NOT Standard English. Her characters would likely struggle to speak Standard English. Those of us without our life-experience being inclusive of other forms of English will likely have to make an effort to get into the flow of this idiom. It is always a good idea for everyone to read in and about areas that are not centering our own unique experiences. This task is made easier, and harder, when reading English that is not the same as the English most of my readers speak. The effort one puts in to see this magnificent, flexible tool of a language used in unfamiliar ways is a big benefit to those who make it. We're seeing our words and our understanding of them used and applied to think thoughts we could never come up with. Isn't that the entire point of reading fiction? Stretch your horizons a bit more with every read.

I am sure you're expecting that I will use the Bryce Method of offering a story-by-story opinion of each piece. Well, you lose this time. The nine stories are:

Prologue: The Dragon's Mouth (Bocas del Dragón)
Endangered Species
White Envelope
The Ides of March
Home
Loosed
Six Months
Santimanitay
Epilogue: Kings of the Earth

I've chosen not to review them individually this time because that is just not the point of this exercise; no one story here is exciseable from its context to present on its own as a really satisfying story. Contrast this with the above-referenced If I Survive You, whose stories are satisfying as stories, if slightly less so as a braid; but they weren't written to be one, so that's not shade. The difference is in expectations. Interconnected stories share a lot of themes, or characters, or settings; braided stories share all of those things and operate towards one storytelling goal, as novels do, though without a novel's unity of voice and/or purpose.

PLEASANTVIEW succeeds as a braid of stories, a polyvocal novel, in a way that a more ordinary novelistic structure would strain to match. It succeeds on its own terms, and offers us as readers access to a very different way of being in the world. The best kind of fiction, then, is what this is.

BROTHER ALIVE, creative, boundary-crossing "realism of a larger reality"

BROTHER ALIVE
ZAIN KHALID
Grove Press
$18.00 trade paper, available now

Rating: 4.5* of five

FINALIST for the second annual Ursula K. LeGuin Prize for Fiction. Winners were announced on her birthday, 21 October, last year, so might be again this year, but no formal announcement of that was made that I found.

The Publisher Says: From the winner of the NYPL Young Lions Fiction Award and the CLMP Firecracker Award, and finalist for the NBCC John Leonard Prize, comes an astonishing debut novel about family, sexuality, and capitalist systems of control, following three adopted brothers who live above a mosque in Staten Island with their imam father

In 1990, three boys are born, unrelated but intertwined by circumstance: Dayo, Iseul, and Youssef. They are adopted as infants and live in a shared bedroom perched atop a mosque in one of Staten Island’s most diverse and precarious neighborhoods, Coolidge. The three boys are an inseparable if conspicuous trio: Dayo is of Nigerian origin, Iseul is Korean, and Youssef indeterminately Middle Eastern. Nevertheless, Youssef is keeping a secret: he sees a hallucinatory double, an imaginary friend who seems absolutely real, a shapeshifting familiar he calls Brother.

The boys’ adoptive father, Imam Salim, is known for his radical sermons, but at home he is often absent, spending long evenings in his study with whiskey-laced coffee, writing letters to his former compatriots back in Saudi Arabia. Like Youssef, he too has secrets, including the cause of his failing health and the truth about what happened to the boys’ parents. When Imam Salim’s path takes him back to Saudi Arabia, the boys will be forced to follow. There they will be captivated by an opulent, almost futuristic world, a linear city that seems to offer a more sustainable modernity than that of the West. But they will have to change if they want to survive in this new world, and the arrival of a creature as powerful as Brother will not go unnoticed.

Stylistically brilliant and intellectually acute, Brother Alive is a remarkable novel of family, capitalism, power, sexuality, and the possibility of reunion for those who are broken.

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

My Review: I'll start with a quote, though not one from the book:

“Hard times are coming, when we’ll be wanting the voices of writers who can see alternatives to how we live now, can see through our fear-stricken society and its obsessive technologies to other ways of being, and even imagine real grounds for hope. We’ll need writers who can remember freedom—poets, visionaries—realists of a larger reality.”      —Ursula K. Le Guin in her 2014 National Book Award speech

It seems to me that UKL was thinking of Zain Khalid.

In his debut novel, he takes on a lot...A LOT...of terribly important subjects of immediate world relevance. As a result of this, some storytelling basics don't get their arguably necessary due, eg howinahell does a single Saudi man enter the US and live in New York City with not one soul thinking it odd he's raising kids of wildly disparate ethnic backgrounds? Social services would be involved in these kids' lives in the real NYC.

So, okay, I'm not going to go too hard after that kind of stuff because it's just not that relevant to the author's purpose. Be aware that details like this are left open, and decide if that matters a lot to you. I decided it didn't and moved on to Youssef, Iseul, and Dayo's life with Father. Salim, their radical reformist of a father, is ironically named something that means "correct, free from error, safe, intact, unharmed, unblemished, healthy" while also drinking whisky in his coffee (much against his religion's explicit orders) as he pens famously incendiary sermons on Muslim identity. (See what I mean about Child Protective Services? There'd be a home visit or two.) What makes this more important is that it's Youssef who's narrating this story...his benignly neglected son notices the father's behavior that doesn't quite fit with the mesage. He and his brothers (and Brother, his possibly real/probably imaginary/not quite sure if he's corporeal other, sometimes animal sometimes human self. The boys, like siblings do, just accept the way things are, and move on with growing up and growing apart. Youssef questions the origins of his family but never the reality of it; they, in turn, seem to know about Brother but find their own concerns...who were their parents? Where did their Imam-dad get them?...more compeling and involving than some imaginary friend of their brother's. That same brother who is the one whose non-standard thinking unearths the secrets they've wondered about.

A parent worth his salt would notice this kid's persistent and consistent hallucination and get him some help...not Salim. He's got bigger problems. He wants these boys to be models of what he thinks is right-thinking, morally correct men! While demanding they conform, he models the opposite in his Westernized behaviors, and ignores a sign of burgeoning mental health issues in Youssef. Which is why this section of the story involved me so deeply. I was malignly neglected, while being told I was not who they wanted me to be, by my family (especially my parents) and was re-experiencing the outrage I now feel at their dereliction of duty on these boys' behalf. It kept me fanning the pages for sure.

The action shifts from lower-class Staten Island in post-9/11 world to Salim's story of from whom and why he got these kids. This is interesting, but it's really lightly gone over, and is the set-up for the final section set in The Line, Saudi Arabia's astounding city of the future that they're building with the oceans of money petrochemical exploitation has given them permission to create using slave labor from around the developing world. (This isn't foregrounded, but there's a strong streak of anti-capitalism in Zain Khalid's anti-colonialism. These are very agreeable qualities to me, but note their presence before deciding to make a run at this long, magisterially paced book.) It is in this last section that I lost my sense of the author being in full control of his narrative. A disease process, the shift of Brother from a child's fantasy key to a very different one as Youssef, now a gay young adult, resumes the narrative's reins.

This near-future Paradise is poorly thought out, to me as a long term reader of speculative fiction. The satirical, I suppose, take on the use of state power melded to religious coercion (not the author's words), made me think of so many literary writers' attempts to use genre conventions in not-new, not-fresh ways to make their points. I like ambiguity, and I approve of the author's politics, but I wanted the end section to finish before it did because too many simple snips that could've brought the purpose of the piece into focus weren't made. The result is meandering and unfocused ideas veiled by some fantastical, onnly-slightly-exaggerated elements. Go big or go home, Author Khalid: It's SF or it's not.

What it was, as a whole read, was beautifully written on a sentence level family saga with a gay undercurrent. It really deserves praise and support because it's hugely ambitious and frankly uninterested in your whiteness. It merits your eyeblinks because it's got a solid core of story that, my crotchets and misgivings aside, is draws the story-hungry reader along.

I'm very glad I read it. I hope you will, too.