Frank B. Wilderson III, _Afropessimism_

 I DECIDED TO pick this up after reading Greg Tate's review in The Nation last fall (Sept. 17, 2021). One of the last things Tate published, I guess, and characteristically sharp and memorable. It wasn't a rave review by any means, but it certainly left the impression that the book was strong and important.

Afropessimism (the book) aligns in my head with Virginie Despentes's King Kong Theory and Maggie Nelson's The Argonauts in that it is critical theory, memoir, and capital-W Writing all at the same time. I can imagine it sitting on the same syllabus as Michel Foucault and Judith Butler, or the same syllabus as James Baldwin and Toni Morrison, or the same syllabus as Rebecca Solnit and David Foster Wallace. 

Afropessimism (the theory) is of Wilderson's own coining, I think, though he cites Frantz Fanon, Orlando Patterson, and Saidiya Hartman as foundational. The theory is that Black subjection, the white preconception that Blacks are slaves and not humans, is so basic to white people's identity that they will never voluntarily give it up. However many sermons are preached, or marches are held, or Obamas are elected, the assumption of superiority will keep percolating in the white unconscious, wreaking the same social havoc it has since at least 1619.

I hope he's wrong, but I don't know that he is, and a lot of our public life suggests he's right.

The more controversial aspect of Afropessisism is that Blacks are a unique kind of Other among America's Others, such as the brown, the Asian, the female, the disabled, and the queer. Whites can be maneuvered into seeing the humanity of these Others, but the humanity of the Black is simply inadmissible and unimaginable. Wilderson seems skeptical of any attempt at coalition-building that does not grant this premise. I gather this does not sit well with some (see the chapters "Punishment Park" or "The Trouble with Humans"). 

Oddly, and to my own surprise, I found it relatively easy to identify with Wilderson. He is just two years younger than I am, we both grew up in the midwest, and we were both fascinated as teenagers with the radical politics of the late 1960s. As a white kid in Iowa, though, there was no way I was going to hang out with the Black Panthers. But Wilderson did hang out with the Black Liberation Army, which meant he got the attention of COINTELPRO. Then, while I was slogging through my dissertation, Wilderson was a stockbroker during the "greed is good" era, then an MFA student hanging out with Edward Said, then an ANC cadre (and restaurant worker) hanging out with Nadine Gordimer, then completing a doctorate in Berkeley and having a breakdown or two along the way. In short, his life has been wildly different than mine in uncountable ways. Still, I kept thinking, I get this guy. Is it generational? Is it the midwest? Maybe it was his good words for Marguerite Young.

Brontez Purnell, _Since I Laid My Burden Down_

 SIMPLE ENOUGH PREMISE--gay Black man raised in rural Alabama, long since resident in Bay Area and deeply conversant in clubbing, drugs, and sex, goes back home for a family funeral, hangs around for a while, gains some clarity on a few points, then returns to Bay Area. 

Purnell himself, like his protagonist DeShawn, was raised in Alabama and now lives in Oakland, so one guesses that some aspects of the novel are autobiographical.

Autobiographical or not, though, it's highly entertaining.

Why is this novel so entertaining? The writing is colorful, shameless, brisk, often funny. The narrative toggles, sometimes very abruptly, between its Alabama and California settings, with appropriate contrast, but Alabama is its down-home way crazier than you would expect, San Francisco in its weird way more domesticated. DeShawn is on a pilgrimage of self-discovery, going home to the home you famously can't again go to, and apparently figuring something out...but what? He doesn't quite know, and Purnell wisely chooses not to lean on the point too hard. Purnell may actually be having a little fun with the old hero's journey trope. "He had been eating a lot of desserts. It felt good."

It's a foul-mouthed, gleefully wicked coming-of-age story that may actually be a never-grew-up story, and I don't think it will end up on any of the YA reading lists that Call Me by Your Name managed to sweet-talk its way onto, but if you're looking for entertaining--here you go.

Jonathan Coe, _Middle England_

 THE THIRD, PERHAPS final novel in a series that began with The Rotters' Club (which I have read) and continued with The Closed Circle (which I have not), revolving around a group of characters who meet at secondary school in (or near) Birmingham in the mid-1970s. The Rotters Club is set during their school days; this one, although it opens in 2010 and closes in 2018, centers around the Brexit election of 2016. 

I first became aware of Coe as the biographer of British experimental novelist B. S. Johnson, so I was expecting him to lean in an experimental direction himself, but no--he's a straight-down-the-middle realist, dealing in relatively familiar kinds of characters and settings in in the spirit of Stendhal's mirror on the roadway, a contemporary Trollope.

What the novel mainly registers is the bitter, burnt-air atmosphere of politically-inspired hostility rupturing work relationships, family relationships, even interactions with strangers--which is to say, as an American reader, that it is both revealing and all too recognizable.

For most of my life, it seems to me, Great Britain and the USA have been dancing the same dances at roughly the same time, politically. We had LBJ and the Great Society, they had Harold Wilson. They had Thatcher, we had Reagan. We had our "Third Way" moment in Bill Clinton, they had theirs with Tony Blair. They had Brexit; we had Trump.

I'd be interested in a novel that tries to do for the USA from 2010 to 2018 what Coe does here for the UK, but does anyone have any ambition to do the big-picture Dos Passos thing any longer? 

Franzen, maybe? But apparently his new one is set fifty years ago. 

Updike would have been up for it. Or Tom Wolfe. 

Oy, high on the list of things I would not want to read: Tom Wolfe's novel about the Trump era.