These two debut linked short story collections had enough in common to get a mention in yesterday’s Book Serendipity post, including a 2023 publication date, a central sibling pair, Jamaican heritage, and memories of a devastating hurricane.

If I Survive You by Jonathan Escoffery

A starred Kirkus review first put this on my radar, and I requested a copy back in February. Though I enjoyed the first two stories, I then set the book aside. Its longlisting for this year’s Booker Prize reminded me to pick it back up and it’s now one of the six on the shortlist.

Five of eight stories are filtered through the consciousness of Trelawny, the younger son of Topper and Sanya, who immigrated to Miami in the late 1970s to escape unrest in Kingston, Jamaica. Older brother Delano is the golden boy, yet in a post-recession landscape both sons struggle to get by. After their parents’ split, the family home seems like a totem of security.

An accident leads Delano to give up his tree service business and pursue reggae music professionally. Trees play a pivotal role: when Topper humiliates him at a party by calling him “soft” and “defective,” Trelawny attacks his father’s beloved ackee tree with an axe. After Topper kicks him out, Trelawny lives in his car, accepting a succession of strange and sordid gigs (the stuff of “Odd Jobs” and the title story; “in Miami … you’re as likely to wind up getting your organs harvested as you are to make a profit”) before settling on teaching.

Three stories are in the always engaging second person (one of those inhabiting Topper’s perspective), three are narrated in the first person by Trelawny, and two are in the third person – the one about Delano and another about their cousin Cukie (“Splashdown”). Family legacy, particularly from fathers, is a major theme. “I felt sick with hatred,” Trelawny says. “For her [racist] father, yes, but for all fathers, for their propensity for passing down the worst of themselves.”

Trelawny is an entertaining POV character, jaded but quick-witted as he navigates microaggressions. People are confused about whether he’s African American or Latino. “In Flux,” the opening story and probably the strongest, has him coming to terms with what it means to be Black in America while living in Florida or at college in the Midwest, prompted by a question he frequently has to field: “What are you?” My other favourite story was “Independent Living,” in which he’s an administrator for an oversubscribed senior housing block and has to become as wily as his residents.

Escoffery creates a strong sense of place and character. I suspect there’s a lot that’s autobiographical here, as is common in first books. His ambivalence about sites that hold personal significance is palpable. Ideally, a linked collection will be composed of confident stand-alone stories that together are more than the sum of their parts. I didn’t really feel that about these. While the voice is promising and several stories are highlights, the whole didn’t set me on fire. (And I’d be astonished if it won the Booker. That’ll go to a guy named Paul.) Maybe Escoffery has a great novel brewing, though.

A favourite passage:

“On the day you are scheduled to begin the sixth grade, a hurricane named Andrew pops your house’s roof open, peeling it back like the lid of a Campbell’s soup can, pouring a fraction of the Atlantic into your bedroom, living room—everywhere—bloating carpet, drywall, and fibreboard with sopping sea salt corrosion. It disinters the kidney-colored fibreglass from the walls and ceiling, splaying the house’s entrails on the lawn. The storm chops your neighbor’s house to rubble, parks a tugboat at the far end of your street.”

With thanks to 4th Estate for the free copy for review.

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The Human Origins of Beatrice Porter & Other Essential Ghosts by Soraya Palmer

Sasha and Zora are steeped in Caribbean folklore absorbed from their parents. Nigel, from Jamaica, tells them about “Rolling Calf,” the vengeful ghost of a butcher paying penance for all the animals he slaughtered; Trinidadian Beatrice reminds them that the hero of the Anansi stories is a woman. Like the trickster spider, these Brooklyn adolescents will have to live by their wits when their family disintegrates – Nigel leaves to marry a German woman and Beatrice returns to Trinidad when she’s diagnosed with metastatic skin cancer.

Apart from a few third-person segments about the parents, the chapters, set between 1997 and 2005, trade off first-person narration duties between Zora, a romantic would-be writer, and Sasha, the black sheep and substitute family storyteller-in-chief, who dates women and goes by Ashes when she starts wearing a binder. It’s interesting to discover examples of queer erasure in both parents’ past, connecting Beatrice more tightly to Sasha than it first appears – people always condemn most vehemently what they’re afraid of revealing in themselves.

I’ve had too much of the patois + legends/magic realism combo recently (e.g., When We Were Birds) and Palmer tries too hard to root her stories in time through 1990s pop culture references. She also exhibits a slightly annoying MFA stylistic showiness, whereas Escoffery’s work feels more natural. Still, this is more novel than stories (the opposite is true for If I Survive You) and thus the kind of book that would make a good wildcard selection on the Women’s Prize longlist. (Passed along by a book club friend)

A favourite passage:

Zora: “It was like the end of a Jenga game, the way shit just fell apart. Our family foundation had been fading slowly for years, and yet when it all collapsed, it seemed to happen all at once.”

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Final reviews and a roundup coming up soon.

Currently reading: Hateship, Friendship, Courtship, Loveship, Marriage by Alice Munro; Close Company: Stories of Mothers and Daughters, ed. Christine Park; Small, Burning Things by Cathy Ulrich