With the US embroiled in its painful, prolonged reckoning with police violence against African-Americans, it is timely — and perhaps not surprising — that the National Book award last month was given to this brilliant and inventive novel about race and discrimination in the States. What is most surprising, however, is how funny the novel is. Jason Mott, an already successful American novelist, has dared to bring anarchic farce, vertiginous layers of irony and often riotous hilarity to the Black Lives Matter movement and, indeed, to the entire field of portraying the black American experience in fiction.
Mott’s route into his subject is so sharp and funny — for the first uproarious third of the book, at least — that I frequently had tears in my eyes. The novel is narrated by a jaded, unnamed author on a relentless promotional tour for his latest novel, which has become a runaway bestseller. The narrator, however, has become so numb to the travails of his tour (“two cities in Florida . . . three book festivals in New Orleans”) that he can’t remember what his novel is about‚ even as it leaves people sobbing in the audience.
Enormous blind spots turn out to be the axis on which the novel’s examination of racial violence revolves. It would unfairly spoil the novel’s comic punch to reveal the most striking aspect of the narrator’s life that he has neglected to recall. Suffice to say that his fantastically absurd revelation is made just as he is swept up in a Black Lives Matter march over the death of a black youngster at the hands of the police — another event the narrator has failed to pay sufficient attention to. In Mott’s scabrously funny lampoon of the march, the protesters are all children, the youngest “in diapers and still sucking on an insulated bottle”.
Here, as with almost everything in this intelligent novel, the comedy deliberately conceals another key to Mott’s anatomy of being black in America. The means by which black children absorb a sense of alienation, fear and helplessness from the cradle upwards is the central concern of a separate strand of the novel, in which Mott evokes the childhood of a boy nicknamed “Soot” who is “not dark-skinned, but black. Black as shut eyes. Black as starless nights.” Soot’s parents teach him a superpower — how to turn himself invisible. This lean towards science fiction was the mainstay of Mott’s three earlier novels, which featured deadly global contagions, the magical ability to heal people of their physical ailments, and loved ones returning from the dead.
This ingenious book, however, is a wild sui generis departure from his previous use of genre. Deployed to heartbreaking effect, Mott’s fling with the supernatural here is just one of a breathtaking number of devices through which he savages everything from the American publishing industry (authors who wear sport coats enjoy a “seventeen percent difference in sales”, the narrator’s cut-throat agent spouts) to the victimhood of the Blue Lives Matter movement.
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The most enduring impression of the novel, however, is neither its comedy nor its satirical outrage, but its sense of deep, lingering sadness. There are two absolutely terrifying sequences in which black men are stopped by police, and a harrowing image of the ghosts of slaves appearing on the landscape of Mott’s native North Carolina, “effervescing from the cornfield”. It is also the only the novel in which I can remember a line of the author’s acknowledgments making me cry.
Mott has managed to construct a farcical universe in which the laughter nails, in a way an angry, earnest assault might have missed, the grimness and intractability of America’s racial legacy.
Hell of a Book by Jason Mott
Trapeze £14.99 pp336