Mat Johnson

Mat Johnson is a gifted writer who is nothing if not funny, even if his humor leaves the reader unsure of whether he's laughing at you, with you or at himself. In 'Loving Day' the humor is still there but there is a bitter edge to it just out of reach.

Loving Day (so named after the famous Virginia couple who overturned miscegenation laws in the US) begins with homecoming of the reluctantly bi-racial Warren Duffy, fresh off of the failure of his personal, business and artistic aspirations. show more Coming home after the death of his father, to a derelict mansion haunted by entities unknown, he's confronted with with the existence of a teenage daughter who's been raised as white and has runaway from her grandfather to live with the father she's never known. Caught between a white past in his Irish-American father and a white future in his hitherto Jewish-American daughter Duffy fights hard to retain a black identity for himself while his daughter comes to terms with her bi-racial identity.

Johnson gives the conflict physical form in the the two major settings he uses in the novel; Duffy's dead father's house in what was once a neighborhood for wealthy whites but had become a black neighborhood down on its luck by the time his father bought it , and a school for biracial children that his daughter initially chose because she didn't want to go to a black school. Johnson captures an older generation's sense of bi-racial unease and need to identify as one or the other and a younger generation's refusal to choose. Even opinions on the presence in his house is divided, his daughter see apparitions as the ghosts of the first inter-racial couple while Warren thinks they may be crackheads, given the neighborhood.

The novel reads as one of his most personal, though admittedly as the mother of two biracial boys I may be projecting. In ways both Zane Pinchback from 'Incognegro' and Warren Duffy are alter egos of the author himself. Both extremely pale black men who could pass for white, but where 'Incognegro' manages to be almost self amused 'Loving Day' has a frustrated anger. I can't wait to see what Johnson writes next. show less

A complete inversion of Edgar Allen Poe’s The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym of Nantucket, Mat Johnson’s Pym is a brilliant satire of race relations in America from a black perspective, one that’s embedded in a creative, fantastical tale, picking up on the enigmatic ending to Poe’s novel. Here it’s not a group of white explorers going to Antarctica and discovering a secret island of black “savages” who betray them, it’s a group of black explorers who follow in their footsteps show more and discover an albino race of yeti-like creatures who enslave them. While that may sound heavy, it’s really not – the story is playful, there is a lot of humor, and Mat Johnson also touches on other things, like the main character’s failed relationship with his ex-wife.

Just as America loves to think about itself in an idealized way, in this story there is a painter of saccharine landscapes, likely a stand-in for Thomas Kinkade, who has built a giant, idyllic dome down in Antarctica. It’s meant to be self-sustaining but we find out they run it on gas and don’t think of turning the temperature down from 72. It’s a refuge for the explorers but we soon see they’re second-class citizens in a sharecropper type of arrangement, and never completely out of danger. I thought it was a pretty clever metaphor for America, and also allowed for drama that would make a pretty good movie someday.

Throughout the book Johnson’s writing is scholarly, sharp as a tack, and there are no punches pulled in his satire. He explores what it means to be black, “the fact that our ethnic group is the product of a conspiracy theory,” and the nuances of mixed heritage, often skewering people in his own community along the way. Aside from analyzing Poe’s story for context (even including a lengthy excerpt in the appendix), I loved his literary references to black authors, including various slave narratives but also Frank J. Webb’s The Garies and Their Friends, on black experiences with racism in the north. It’s a very satisfying read, one that serves as a rejoinder to a text filled with racist overtones from an American literary giant nearly two centuries later, all of which is still relevant today.

Quotes:
On representation in literature:
“I like Poe, I like Melville, I like Hemingway, but what I like the most about the great literature created by the Americans of European descent is the Africanist presence within it. I like looking for myself in the whitest of pages. I like finding evidence of myself there, after being told my footprints did not exist on that sand. I think the work of the great white writers is important, but I think it’s most important when it’s negotiating me and my people, because I am as arrogant and selfish a reader as any other.”

On white people:
“That is how they stay so white: by refusing to accept blemish or history. Whiteness isn’t about being something, it is about being no thing, nothing, an erasure. Covering over the truth with layers of blank reality just as the snowstorm was now covering our tent, whipping away all traces of our existence from this pristine landscape.”

And this one:
“My cousin felt that a white liberal was a Caucasian who said to himself or herself every day, ‘Don’t hate niggers. Don’t hate niggers.’ And the rest of white America’s racial perspective was ‘Don’t let the niggers hear you say ‘nigger’ out loud.’” show less

I don't know what I may have missed by not knowing Poe, but I still got a lot of entertainment out of this book because it satirizes much more than Poe - for starters, academia, blackness, whiteness, and Little Debbie snack cakes. It's broad satire, coming close to but not crossing the wackiness line, which seemed just right to me. I think it was channeling Swift and [b:Gulliver's Travels|7733|Gulliver's Travels|Jonathan Swift|https://images.gr-assets.com/books/1427829692s/7733.jpg|2394716] show more even more than Poe. My only criticism is that it went on too long. For me, satire works best in small doses, and I'd have preferred this as a novella. I wonder if the author wrote different versions of the ending - this one didn't feel very satisfying. show less

http://wineandabook.com/2011/09/01/review-pym-by-mat-johnson/

First person narration can be tricky, but Mat Johnson has a sense of voice that rivals Junot Diaz. So clear, so compelling. As I read, I wanted to follow Johnson's main character, Chris Jaynes, anywhere he went. Until he decided to leave the States (and reality) far, far behind...

The premise of this book is really quite genius: the self-described token black professor at a small, predominately white liberal arts college finds show more himself without tenure after favoring teaching Edgar Allen Poe to authors of color. The object of Jaynes' fascination is Poe's only novel, The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym of Nantucket. Johnson does an amazing job of allowing us into Jaynes' psyche as deconstructs Poe's novel, which he sees as part of the "intellectual source of racial Whiteness." In this part of the book, Johnson soars and Jaynes takes us through Poe's work and explains its literary and institutional significance. Strong voice, compelling argument and raw social commentary. Near perfect. Up until this point in the narrative, I was in love with this book.

Then we go to Antarctica. Through a turn of events (which I won't cheat you out of discovering on your own), Jaynes is lead to believe that the events outlined in Poe's novel may not be so fictitious after all. Given the opportunity to, in part, retrace Pym's journey and go to Antarctica, he accepts in hopes of finding the island of Tsalal, an island of pure blackness (which Poe described with much terror) which Jaynes imagines to be the "last untouched bastion of the African diaspora." Unfortunately, once the ship docks, Johnson loses me a bit.

My problem is not with the journey; my problem is not even with the sequence of events that border on science-fiction/disaster porn. My problem is with the way the characters react (or don't) to these events. Typically, when an author decides to dive into the realm of science fiction or adventure, as Johnson absolutely does in the last half of his book, either:
the story takes place in a world where a specific set of magical/heightened/supernatural/etc rules and conditions are consistent and we, as readers accept them as the reality of the story OR
the story takes place in reality as we know it and something unusual/strange/supernatural/world-shattering happens, and the characters react accordingly.
A beautiful example of this is House of Leaves by Mark Z. Danielewski: when the house starts shifting and changing, people freak out, then adapt, then re-approach their new reality. In Johnsons' story, when reality as Jaynes' knows it is turned on its head, the characters just seem to keep moving through the plot without much reflection, except in terms of potential profit. In addition, some pretty major occurrences are mentioned and then never reacted to thoroughly or revisited...which I think, in the end, is not a problem of story as much as a issue with characterization.

Jaynes is a wonderful character. Consistent. Complex. Evolving. But he was the only one flushed out and developed to that extent. The rest of the cast of characters seemed to be more like different sized shadows of people rather than fully realized individuals, with only 2-3 defining characteristics, as opposed to the dynamic, compelling personality given to Jaynes. When they stand side by side as the same bizarre events unfold, it's hard to completely give yourself to the world Johnson creates given their reactions (or lack thereof).

But back to Johnson's genius: he crafts the story utilizing the same structure as Poe's Narrative. As I read, I kept noticing how Johnson took some of the most salient story elements from Poe's piece and reappropriated them for Jaynes' journey (if you're curious as to which story elements he chose, message me, as I don't want to give away any major plot points here!). Super clever, and done in such a subtle way that it's in no way gimmicky or forced.

Rubric rating: 7. I would love to read more by Johnson...as long as it's set north of Antarctica. show less