Tri-State Turmoil

Barkan's Briefly Noted, Vol. 4

Welcome to the latest edition of Barkan’s Briefly Noted, my review of contemporary books. For prior editions, go here, here, and here.

What the Statue Thinks by Michael Goodwin Hilton (Wild Ink Publishing)

The playwright Michael Goodwin Hilton’s short story collection, his first, is a sweet antidote to a lot of the bloodless swill in contemporary publishing. Hilton’s stories, many of them set in New Jersey over the last couple of decades, are equally punchy and pretty. He roves among a motley crew of working-class alcoholics, struggling actresses, philandering college professors, and teenage lifeguards, his collection deftly plumbing the psychologies of individuals who might be in radically different stations of their lives but find themselves, young or old, existentially and spiritually adrift. The stories have an alluring rhythm, the prose finely-tuned and understated; one standout is “It Happened in Moonlight,” in which Abe and Diane, an aging married couple grappling with the death of their child, become enmeshed with a much younger couple at a lakefront vacation home that was supposed to be vacant. One reads these stories with a sense that Hilton has made a rather meticulous study of human relationships, in all their glory and failure. He is an observer of the best kind, and you can feel and taste these intimate worlds, where each gesture, as subtle as it might be, carries seismic import. I ripped through What the Statue Thinks; it was a literary cleanser, of the sort that’s sometimes hard to come by. “Their eyes held for only a fraction of a second, but in that fleeting connection, Diane felt as though they’d noticed each other for the first time in years,” Hilton writes. “It felt oddly transgressive, like staring too long at the sun.”

This is Not America: Why We Need a British Conversation on Race by Tomiwa Owolade (Atlantic Books)

When I traveled to London this year, I was struck by America’s cultural dominance. The British were reading about our election, devouring our pop culture, and even lapping up our fast food. If the American Empire is in terminal decline, its cultural influence has never been greater—that I am sure of, having bounced around the world over the last two years. Tomiwa Owolade, an impressive young British writer, is aware of this too, and he makes it clear that he is very fond of America—particularly its film and literature. So when he writes a book called This Is Not America, it is not intended as an anti-American screed; Owolade is too nuanced for that, and his book, out of all the studies and commentaries I’ve read on race and class over the last half decade, might be the most necessary. Born in Nigeria and raised, later on, in London, Owolade belongs to a growing cohort of African immigrants in Britain who upend the popular conception, on both the right and left, of race. This Is Not America is intended as a rejoinder to the George Floyd-inspired racial reckoning of 2020 and how it impacted Britain. In his homeland—he stresses he considers himself both British and Black—the conversations around race became, in his view, far too Americanized, as leftists in Britain adopted the same anti-racist rhetoric, inspired by Ibram X. Kendi and Robin DiAngelo, that had swept across elite American institutions. Owolade methodically argues that Britain is different: its Black population is not a monolith, they are not the descendants of those brought to Europe in slave ships, and nothing of the likes of Jim Crow ever took root in the U.K. He does not deny the existence of anti-Black racism in Britian—in fact, This Is Not America is a useful document of the nation’s sordid past—but he stresses that it must be placed in context and British Blacks, like the majority white population, should be understood in all their complexity and how they’re subject to the crosscurrents of class and geography. Owolade operates in the humanist tradition of Baldwin and Ellison, and he makes an optimist’s case for the Black immigrant’s place in the heart of the old empire. He is proudly against separatism, and with great nuance he elucidates the differences between how race is conceived in the U.S. and U.K., with the latter, in his view, containing far more of an immigrant story—Black Africans and Black Caribbeans (these, in particular, as subjects of the Crown) changing the nature of what it means to be British. “Racism is not the same everywhere in the world,” Owolade insists. And nations and cultures can supersede race. The Black American, he argues, has much more in common with the white American than the Black Englishman or first-generation Ghanian immigrant living in London. Race, too, is contextual: a biracial Nigerian, in Nigeria, is regarded as white, while he is Black if he lives in the U.K. or U.S. The dream of the melting pot, he contends, remains alive and well. “Ultimately,” Oliwade writes, “it is only by accepting the fact that black British people are already integrated into British society that we can build an effective form of anti-racist politics, one that is both humane and grounded in reality.”

The Hotel Egypt by Stuart M. Ross (Spuyten Duvvil)

Queens-bred Ty Rossberg is in a long-term relationship with Jenny Marks, who finally breaks out as a popular, confessional writer documenting their most intimate moments, including a miscarriage. Ty resents Jenny, who is hanging out with “downtown” types and not staying true, in his view, to their roots. He is a witty, self-righteous motormouth, an ill match for Jenny, despite their long history. The Hotel Egypt, Ross’ latest novel, is a waterfall of dialogue and breakneck absurdity; there’s a dash of Stanley Elkin in the prose, and if it all can feel a bit much, Ross keeps the reader bolted upright with another punch-drunk scene that might be real or may just be part of Ty’s fever dream. He arrives in Chicago, separates from Jenny, and books himself into the Trump Hotel during the reign of the 45th president. He mulls his fallen relationship, the cherished hours spent with Jenny watching “Clueless” on DVD (he doesn’t care that it’s available on streaming), and falls in with parking lot heiress Ellory Allen, his fizzing dream girl, who is sexually audacious and definitely too good to be true. Ty and Ellory travel the world, get tangled up in a ménage à trois with a hippie jazz musician—Ellory revels in this, Ty does not—and return to possibly start the family Ty never could have with Jenny. That is, of course, if the baby in Ellory’s stomach is really Ty’s. Contradictions plague and contort him, yet offer a certain vitality. “I fear,” Ty declares, “being faithful, cheating, being ignored, recognized, rejection and acceptance, nice dreams, and snakes living in cake boxes inside refrigerators under floorboards in unfinished basements.”