INTERVIEW: JONATHAN ESCOFFERY

AUTHOR SPOTLIGHT Jonathan Escoffery

Cola Greenhill-Casados

Jonathan Escoffery’s hotly anticipated debut is thriving: If I Survive You (MCD/Farrar, Straus and Giroux, Sept. 6) was named a National Book Award nominee on Sept. 16, just 10 days after it first graced bookstore shelves. This “sharp and inventive” collection of linked stories, featuring “clever, commanding, and flexible” writing, centers on Trelawny, the American-born son of a Jamaican family who fled Kingston for Miami in the late 1970s. With verve, wit, and heart, Trelawny grapples with what it means to be who he is in the world he inhabits and navigates complex family dynamics—his relationship with his older brother, Delano; a falling-out with his father, Topper. Escoffery extends similar care to his other characters’ perspectives, hopes, and dreams. In a starred review, Kirkus calls If I Survive You “a fine debut that looks at the complexities of cultural identity with humor, savvy, and a rich sense of place.”

Escoffery answered Kirkus’ questions about If I Survive You and his year in writing and reading via email.

What were the particular pleasures of writing from Trelawny’s perspective in If I Survive You? On one hand, I share some similarities with Trelawny, particularly along the lines of cultural background, so affirming my own experiences on the page felt wonderfully transgressive, since I’d never read about a Jamaican American growing up in Miami and there wasn’t much evidence to suggest I was allowed to write about these characters. On the other hand, Trelawny is hilarious because he’s hyperaware of his place in society and is well poised to point out how absurd certain elements of our society are, even if he feels there’s little he can do to change these things.

I read in another interview that you imagined these characters into being—Trelawny, Topper, Delano—in a story that ultimately didn’t make it into the book. What qualities did a story need to possess to make the cut? For a story to make the final cut, it had to push the larger storyline forward and help to build out the book’s arc or else deepen our understanding of these characters’ wounds. The “work” a story did could not be redundant. I’d written several flash pieces that provided glimpses into Trelawny’s childhood wounds, but when held up next to the longer stories, I found that the ones that made it into the book revealed what makes Trelawny tick through his decisions and actions.

What was it like to make the transition from being a writer to a published author? It’s wonderful to accomplish a long-held goal or dream. I’ve come to see the transition less as a kind of graduation and more like being at a different point in a cycle. So many writers daydream about becoming published authors, and authors often wish they could take off their author personas and just get back to being writers again. The writing is where the purest joy resides.

What’s been the best part of having this book out in the world? The best part has been connecting with readers, especially those who report seeing their lived experiences in the pages of a book for the first time.

Have you been able to do much reading this year? Any 2022 books you particularly admired or enjoyed? I’ll admit that it’s been one of my most difficult years for reading, given the demands of launching the book, but two favorites this year were Sweet, Soft, Plenty Rhythm by Laura Warrell and Night of the Living Rez by Morgan Talty.

Interview by Megan Labrise.

found, and possibly find happiness with her beloved pen pal, the nobly born fire priest Canon Lir, who has their own considerable store of secrets? Cooney’s stories (such as in her World Fantasy Award–winning collection, The Bone Swans, 2015) typically include violence, abuse, death, ghosts, and the afterlife—elements which in other hands would also be accompanied by gloom and dreary cynicism. But Cooney also always infuses her works with joy, (often literal) lust for life, improbably lighthearted humor, and the possibility of hope; it is an unusual and surprisingly charming and poignant admixture. The concept of a kindhearted necromancer who is a friend to death (and Death, in the persona of the goddess Doédenna) rather than its foe makes perfect sense in this context.

Grisly, dark, lovely, funny, heartfelt.

FELLOWSHIP POINT

Dark, Alice Elliott Marysue Rucci Books/Scribner (592 pp.) $28.99 | July 5, 2022 978-1-982131-81-4

A sweeping story of lifelong best friends from Philadelphia Quaker families who share a vacation spot and a moral exigency. Dark confesses in her acknowledgments that she had “doubts about the appeal of two old ladies,” but she’s written the rare 592-page novel you’ll be sorry to finish. Eighty-year-old spinster Agnes Lee is the successful author of two series of books. She’s known for one of them, 30-plus children’s tales about a 9-year-old named Nan. The other is written under a pseudonym, six sharp social satires following a circle of upper-class Philadelphia girls like the ones Agnes grew up with. But as the curtain opens in March 2000, Agnes is having her very first experience of writer’s block, described in one of many astute passages about the writing life: “Agnes had lost hope for today, too, but her allotted writing time wasn’t up yet. So she sat. Her rule was five hours, and dammit she’d put in five hours.” Just as she packs it in for the day, her best friend, Polly Wister, a devoted wife and mother, arrives for a drink. “We have a problem,” says Agnes. The problem is that they are two of the last three shareholders in Fellowship Point, a large, and largely undeveloped, piece of coastal property in Maine where their families have vacationed for generations. After the two of them are gone, Agnes’ cousin, a wealthy dolt, seems likely to sell out to a developer who would tear down the 19th-century dwellings, destroy a nature sanctuary, and overrun an ancient Indigenous meeting ground to build a resort. Agnes and Polly have other problems, too, each of them held back by choices made long in the past, some of which will be dug out by a nosy young New York editor who’s determined to make Agnes write a memoir. You will surely want to read this book, but you may be able to use its essential wisdom right now: “There wasn’t time for withholding, not in this short life when you were only given to know a few people, and to have a true exchange with one or two.”

Elegantly structured, beautifully written, and altogether diverting, with a powerful message about land ownership in America.

DEVIL HOUSE

Darnielle, John MCD/Farrar, Straus and Giroux (416 pp.) $23.49 | Jan. 25, 2022 978-0-3742-1223-0

A true-crime author researches a mass-murder case that prompts him to reconsider his line of work. Darnielle has an affection for the dark side of pop culture and the way fans of supposedly gloom-and-doom genres like heavy metal and horror are more sophisticated than they get credit for. So this smart, twisty novel about true-crime books and the 1980s “Satanic panic” is a fine fit for him and his best so far. The center and main narrator of the novel is Gage, an author who’s moved to Milpitas, California, as a kind of stunt: He plans to live on the site of an unsolved double murder that took place on Halloween 1986 in an abandoned porn shop that was defaced with occult imagery. Experience has taught Gage how to write about a case like this: His first book, about a teacher who killed two students in self-defense, became a modestly successful film. But that past begins to gnaw at Gage as he becomes more aware of how the genre demands archetypes that cheapen human loss: “I haunt dreadful places and try to coax ghosts from the walls, and then I sell pictures of the ghosts for money.” So the novel becomes a kind of critique of the form, as Darnielle (and Gage) imagines the crime victims (and ideas of victimhood) in more nuanced ways. This takes some odd turns: Substantial passages are written in ersatz Middle English, part of a subplot involving Arthurian legends. But he’s excellent at getting into the uncomfortable details of abusive homes and how fear sparks an urge to escape both physically and creatively. And the closing pages cleverly resolve the Milpitas mystery while avoiding sordid crime reportage’s demand for scapegoats and simple motives.

An impressively meta work that delivers the pleasures of true-crime while skewering it.

THE FAMILY IZQUIERDO

Degollado, Rubén Norton (304 pp.) $16.95 paper | Sept. 6, 2022 978-0-393-86682-7

Three generations of Izquierdos tell the story of their family and the misfortunes believed to be caused by a curse. In 1958, Octavio Izquierdo and his wife, Guadalupe, begin building their life in McAllen, Texas. They buy a home and set up a painting and drywall business while dreaming of the good future their children will have—how these things will be their inheritance. But life isn’t always easy for the family. After discovering a goat hoof and a rooster foot buried in the yard, Octavio believes his jealous neighbor, Emiliano Contreras, has put a curse on the family. Ordinary disasters like miscarriages, accidents, and sadness are attributed to it. Years later, in declining health, Octavio is consumed by his belief in the curse, and he bounces around from nursing home to nursing home because none of the orderlies can keep him calm. His adult children aren’t sure if it really is a curse or a genetic predisposition to anxiety and susto. However, Dina, one of his daughters, refuses to leave her house after having what she believes is a prophetic nightmare showing Emiliano Contreras working with the devil to use grackles to put the evil eye on the Izquierdos. In this gloriously rich epic, we get to see a full picture of the family. Each interlocking chapter is told by a different character, unifying into a thoughtfully crafted history spanning decades. The characters, who are complex and tightly linked to one another, are enlivened by their belief in a mix of superstition, brujería, and Catholicism that feels both familiar and playful. Family celebrations like a Posada, a quinceañera, and the Fourth of July particularly highlight family dynamics. Though most of the stories focus on the Izquierdo family as a whole, there’s one called “La Milagrosa Selena” that is less a story and more a letter to the Diocese of Brownsville that advocates canonizing the queen of Tejano music, Selena Quintanilla-Pérez; it’s a surprising delight.

An instant Tejano classic.

THE CHRISTIE AFFAIR

de Gramont, Nina St. Martin’s (320 pp.) $27.99 | Feb. 1, 2022 978-1-2502-7461-8

A reimagining of Agatha Christie’s famous 11-day disappearance, adding a murder mystery worthy of the dame herself. The bare facts are here just as they happened. In December 1926, having announced his intention to divorce her so he could marry his mistress, Christie’s husband took off to spend a weekend in the country. Sometime that night, Agatha left home, abandoning her car beside a nearby chalk quarry with a suitcase full of clothes inside. Eleven days later, after an internationally publicized manhunt, she turned up at a spa hotel in Harrogate, having signed in under the name of her husband’s lover. Upon that frame of fact, de Gramont weaves brilliantly imagined storylines for both the mistress and the writer, converging at the spa hotel, where not one but two guests promptly turn up dead. The novel is narrated by the mistress, here called Nan O’Dea, a complicated woman with many secrets. As she announces in the first line of the novel, “A long time ago in another country, I nearly killed a woman.” Nan is looking back at a time when she had larceny in mind, and it was Agatha’s husband she was aiming to steal, though one has to wonder why. Archie comes across as a whiny baby of a man who has this to say about his plan to dump his devoted wife: “There’s no making everybody happy…. Somebody has got to be unhappy and I’m tired of it being me.” Archie aside, de Gramont has a gift for creating dreamy male

“A clever and affecting high-concept novel of high finance.”

trust

characters: Both a “rumpled” police inspector called Chilton, who’s sent to the Harrogate area to look for the missing author, and a blue-eyed Irishman named Finbarr, who has a connection to Nan, are irresistible, and only more so due to the tragic toll taken on each by the war. De Gramont’s Agatha—who walks away from her disabled vehicle forgetting her suitcase but not her typewriter—is also easy to love. The story unfolds in a series of carefully placed vignettes you may find yourself reading and rereading, partly to get the details straight, partly to fully savor the well-turned phrases and the dry humor, partly so the book won’t have to end, damn it.

Devilishly clever, elegantly composed and structured— simply splendid.

SCARY MONSTERS A Novel in Two Parts

de Kretser, Michelle Catapult (288 pp.) $17.95 paper | April 12, 2022 978-1-64622-109-7

A reversible novel tells the stories of two Asian immigrants to Australia, one 40 years in the past and one in the future. It’s the early 1980s, and 22-year-old Lili’s ambitions are grand: She wants to be a cross between Debbie Harry and Simone de Beauvoir. To that end, she leaves Australia—where she had moved with her parents as a teenager—and accepts a post teaching English in southern France. It’s the era of the Yorkshire Ripper, and Lili sees shadows everywhere she goes. But the real monsters are the larger forces that threaten her existence as a brown-skinned woman: racism and sexism. When Lili’s story concludes, at the end of her eye-opening time in Europe, de Kretser’s inventive book begins again: The novel can be flipped upside down and reversed to tell the story of Lyle, who lives in a future just a bit darker than our present. (To say that the book starts with Lili’s story, though, is an arbitrary matter of a reader’s personal sense of chronology. Since there are two covers and two sets of frontmatter, a reader could equally begin with Lyle and travel back in time to read Lili’s story.) Justifications for this format are clear in both novels: “When my family emigrated,” confesses Lili, “it felt as if we’d been stood on our heads.” Lyle, who believes that he must jettison his past in order to fit in with the “Australian values” of corporate drudgery and a whopping mortgage, echoes Lili’s sentiment: “Immigration breaks people. We try to reconstitute ourselves in our new countries, but pieces of us have disappeared.” Only Lyle’s elderly mother, who lives with the family, reminds him that there is another way to live.

De Kretser, one of our most deeply intelligent writers, offers a book that is wry and heartbreaking, playful and profound.

TRUST

Diaz, Hernan Riverhead (416 pp.) $28.00 | May 3, 2022 978-0-593-42031-7

A tale of wealth, love, and madness told in four distinct but connected narratives. Pulitzer finalist Diaz’s ingenious second novel—following In the Distance (2017)—opens with the text of Bonds, a Wharton-esque novel by Harold Vanner that tells the story of a reclusive man who finds his calling and a massive fortune in the stock market in the early 20th century. But the comforts of being one of the wealthiest men in the U.S.—even after the 1929 crash—are undone by the mental decline of his wife. Bonds is followed by the unfinished text of a memoir by Andrew Bevel, a famously successful New York investor whose life echoes many of the incidents in Vanner’s novel. Two more documents—a memoir by Ida Partenza, an accomplished magazine writer, and a diary by Mildred, Bevel’s brilliant wife—serve to explain those echoes. Structurally, Diaz’s novel is a feat of literary gamesmanship in the tradition of David Mitchell or Richard Powers. Diaz has a fine ear for the differing styles each type of document requires: Bonds is engrossing but has a touch of the fusty, dialogue-free fiction of a century past, and Ida is a keen, Lillian Ross–type observer. But more than simply succeeding at its genre exercises, the novel brilliantly weaves its multiple perspectives to create a symphony of emotional effects; what’s underplayed by Harold is thundered by Andrew, provided nuance by Ida, and given a plot twist by Mildred. So the novel overall feels complex but never convoluted, focused throughout on the dissatisfactions of wealth and the suppression of information for the sake of keeping up appearances. No one document tells the whole story, but the collection of palimpsests makes for a thrilling experience and a testament to the power and danger of the truth—or a version of it—when it’s set down in print.

A clever and affecting high-concept novel of high finance.

THE CANDY HOUSE

Egan, Jennifer Scribner (352 pp.) $27.00 | April 5, 2022 978-1-4767-1676-3

Egan revisits some characters from A Visit From the Goon Squad (2010) and their children to continue her exploration of what fiction can be and do in the 21st century. As Manhattan Beach (2017) showed, Egan is perfectly capable of writing a satisfying traditional novel, but she really dazzles when she turns her formidable gifts to examining the changes to society and individuals wrought by the internet and social media. One of those instruments of