If I Survive You by Jonathan Escoffery has been described as a series of linked stories with recurrent characters. That’s an oversimplification. This literary work, which sheds off its brilliance like the fruit from an ackee tree, is as strongly engineered as the Brooklyn Bridge, if the Brooklyn Bridge was located in Miami. I learned from this story that ackee fruit is poisonous if it’s not ripe.
Delano is the favored brother of an entrepreneurial father. When his marriage fails, a father chooses which son to take with him…that’s Delano. Trelawny carries his I’m the second-best son status like a curse.
You can see why Delano was favored by his father. They’re alike. Father’s an entrepreneur contractor. The day Delano graduates from high school, he starts his own landscaping business. He moves into his father’s showplace Miami residence. There’s a ackee tree in the garden. Attending a social function at the house, Trelawny tries to chop it down and is banned from the residence. Sibling rivalry is a driver of the story.
Trelawny stays with his mother. She eventually moves back to the family’s homebase in Jamaica. Trelawny can’t understand why his mother moves back to an island that, at this time, is experiencing such political breakdown and violence. But I think we can understand. To Trelawny’s mother, it’s home. Trelawny tries out Jamaica. He’s a young man obsessed with his roots. But he finds that he’s more American than he thinks. He prefers the greater stability stateside.
Trelawny is introverted, has trouble looking people in the eye, plays video games in his room. Trelawny does well in school. But he ends up as a college graduate who lives out of his Raider.
There are remarkable fractal joys in If I Survive You. The various “sections” of this hurricane of a narrative don’t so much as follow each other as collide and slice into each other. Piling levels of coolness on top of each other, this is a literary storm that even has an “eye”. At the dead center of the work (at 50% through) there’s a chapter that is about a set of characters that appear nowhere else in the novel. It’s the section called “Splashdown” and it’s a black pearl of noir.
I don’t want to write a lengthy review but there’s so much richness here! Like Trelawny’s stint helping the manager of a subsidized housing project, where you may secure a vacancy (with a bribe to put you on the waiting list) if a tenant commits suicide. There’s an opening chapter, when Trelawny starts school, amazing in its unflagging rhythm and intensity, that would drive Emile Durkheim, a key founder of sociology, into a nervous breakdown. Trelawny finds at this school that no group will claim him. I loved the bit where he says he’s Jamaican by way of an ethnic identity and told that he isn’t, because he doesn’t look Jamaican. He’s assigned Dominican status. So much for being yourself. Society is depicted as a schoolyard where you are told who you are.
I’ve read novels, widely praised, by contemporary authors whose prose seems watery next to the lexical richness of If I Survive You. It’s a book where you end up having empathy for the characters that don’t survive because you don’t like what the “winners” have to do to make it. American society as a tropical piranha tank in a Miami slowly sinking into the sea like the lost city of Atlantis. (The Atlantis comparison from the book.) On sale September 6th from MCD/Farrar. This is an absolutely brilliant debut.
