While one may disagree about Booker Prize winners, amongst the other shortlisted novels for the prize, there are usually some gems to be found. In the 2023 shortlist, Sarah Bernstein’s Study for Obedience is wonderfully detached, telling of a Jewish woman who does not identify with her faith, and seems to have created a faith of her own by making herself a doormat (talk about passive aggressive!) to her family; Paul Harding’s This Other Eden is a simply gorgeous story about how ‘civilisation’ has wronged and ridden roughshod over charming, eccentric, hapless, but happy inhabitants of Apple Island; Chetna Maroo’s Western Lane is a very refreshingly original take on growing up British Asian when the mother of family passed away; Paul Murray’s The Bee Sting is the work of a consummate storyteller about how a family is ripped apart as each tries to survive the vicissitudes of their lives separately; and making it five out of five, Jonathan Escoffery’s If I Survive You, is a simply rollickingly fun read with many accents, asking the grimmest of race questions with the blackest of humour.
Much has been made in reviews about the use of the 2nd person, as our protagonist, Trelawny, a second generation Jamaican American, struggles with the question, What are you? The second person is distancing of course, the story written up as ‘you’ rather than ‘I’ when identifying the narrator. Trelawny is not even named to the reader until quite a long way into the novel, as if the author wants us to work along with this protagonist, to figure out exactly who and what he is. The 2nd person also enables the author to give the ending an ambiguity, to leave the reader guessing.
Essentially, this is a novel about identity politics. From a young age, Trelawny is asked, and therefore wants to know if he is Black; he asks his mother, but his mother does not answer directly. Instead, she tells him he is
made up of all sorts of things. She lists countries, several countries, and assigns great-grandthis and great-grandthat to these many nations. […] ‘Our last name comes from Italy,’ she says, ‘by way of England’. Most of the countries she list are European, and though she’s sure to add Africa as though it were a country or an afterthought, she never mentions race” (p9).
Apparently his great-grandmother was Irish, and great grandfather may have been an Arab.
Trelawny sometimes tries to assert he is American, but this is always rejected by his audience. He knows he speaks differently from his parents (his parents accuse him of talking like a Yankee), and even from his elder brother Delano, who was born in Jamaica. He knows he is not white, by the way society treats him. He knows he is hardly Jamaican, because he is not made to feel he belongs when he visits Jamaica. He does not feel he belongs in his hometown, Miami. He doesn’t even seem to belong to his family, none of whom are willing to take him in (his father throws him out of his house, his mother leaves him to move back to Jamaica, and his brother, Delano, welcomes him for dinner but not to stay overnight). Trelawny is called red, white, chico, oye, told that
You’re not Black. You’re Jamaican” (p23).
When he goes to college, he is even more confused.
“Suddenly, Black Americans are the only Blacks, Blacker than Africans. Black in the (lowered voice) bad way” (p23).
So Trelawny tries to fit in by blending in with a Hispanic or Latino crowd, but he doesn’t speak Spanish. He envies them though,
…who cling to their Puerto Rican or Cuban or Dominican heritage in an exclusionary way, as in I’m not Black; I’m Dominican, you join your friends in calling them sellouts. Uncle Tom-ass, self-hating-ass Negroes. You want Black people strong and unified, after all (p22)
In one encounter before he gets beaten up, a Black friend ambles pass and says to his assailants,
“Nah, he’s cool” (p23)
and he is not beaten up;
How can your Blackness be so tenuous? (p23)
Trelawny explores what Blackness might mean, but
At best, what you discover are loopholes in the designation of Blackness, terms like half-caste and mulatto, semantic parachutes that might allow an escape from Blackness. You reject these terms, come up with your own: Half-rican and Negro-light” (p22).
Trelawny even does a DNA test, which only tells him he is 59.9% European, and 38% West African.
Race, you know, is a social construct. It can’t be measured, because it doesn’t exist – biologically. If the results had shown 99 percent European and 1 percent African, as long as your skin held some degree of brown and your hair still coiled, you’d still be Back and only Black by American standards (p45).
Delano, his brother, spells it out to Trelawny,
You’re Black, Trelawny. In Jamaica, we weren’t, but here we are. There’s a ‘one-drop’ rule (p14).
Trelawney learns that what he is, is geographically dependent, as well as politically dependent.
When you finally move away for college, what shocks you most is how no one in the Midwest assumes you are Puerto Rican or Dominican. Here you are simply, unquestionably Black (p25)
The story is told in supposedly 8 overlapping stories, by a number of protagonists, including Trelawny’s father, brother, older versions of Trelawny, even a cousin. The mosaic style is fine, giving many more perspectives, and in very different voices and accents, particularly Trelawny’s father, who was a marvellous patois (patwar, as the book jokes). However, some of the stories are invariably better told than others, leaving the novel as a whole a little uneven, a little patchy. The 2nd half is nowhere near as strong as the first half. But for all that, this is a bold, no-holds-barred interrogation of the race questions, and America’s attitude to race and colour. Refreshingly original, definitely entertaining and amusing, this book was such a pleasure to read. And given it is a debut novel, maybe Escoffrey’s next may do even more than make the Booker shortlist.
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