The 2021 National Book Award--A New Classic

 The 2021 National Book Award Winner, Jason Mott’s Hell of a Book, is destined to be an important American classic. 

Claiming a new work is certain to be “important” or “a classic” is equal parts easy and difficult. It is easy in the sense that such assertions are, to an extent, opinion-oriented statements that are not easily qualified; what is more, such claims made in the here and now offer the proclaimer years to become reality. I can say this book will be a classic, and then sit back for the remainder of my (hopefully) long life, exclaiming from my very deathbed that the reading public (or academia) simply have not yet seen the wisdom of the accolades I gave this “classic” so many years before. 

Alternatively, it is difficult to say a book is destined for greatness because, first, I am simply one voice among many; nor can I know how this book will age, or how future readers will engage with the book when it becomes not just a literary work but a chronicle of life at the time it was written. Secondly, it has to be said, that it has become far, far too easy for publishing companies, bookstores, celebrity book clubs, and, yes, even the book awards that I follow so closely, to say, “A new classic.” 

In all honesty, such a description sometimes turns me off of a new book entirely. 

Having said all that, having provided you with a laborious disclaimer about the dangers of calling a new book an “important,” eventual “classic,” let me tell you: Hell of a Book is an important, eventual classic. 

Jason Mott’s latest novel features a plot that is a little bit of several things. It is a narrative work of two intertwined yet conflicting biographies. It is a work of social commentary on race, history, and police violence. It is a mystery, while also being a love story–though not the kind of love story you would think of when you hear that term. Beyond the nomenclature “literature,” it really is not easy to pigeon hole this novel into a particular category. 

The basic element of the plot centers around an unnamed Black author (the racial signifier is unavoidable, I assure you) on tour for his bestselling new novel, blithely entitled Hell of a Book. (The meta-like nature of this overlapped title fails to impress the way Emily St. John Mandel’s author-on-book-tour-during-a-plague narrative does in Sea of Tranquility, but that is okay: it is not the important element of Mott’s work.) The fictional(?) author’s tour goes from a simple exercise in banality to something far more interesting when The Kid begins to tag along. The Kid–always capitalized, and also known by a torturous nickname given to him on account of his extremely dark skin–can only be seen and heard by the author. As the country’s news channels are awash with the gruesome details of another police shooting of an unarmed Black child, the author and The Kid attempt to reach each other through the layers of pain and self-protection they have both thrown up around them in order to survive in a world that does not care for or about them. 

The theme of Hell of a Book is more important than its plot. The author and The Kid tell their stories in alternating chapters, their narratives bouncing off each other even as they move through the course of the book towards a conclusion that might or might not be shared. The lack of names ensures each character, one a child, one an adult, both Black males, serves as a sort of racialized “everyman,” illustrating the effect of an all-encompassing system on the lives of individuals. (The very narrative theme that garnered Hungarian author and Holocaust survivor Imre Kertesz a Nobel Prize in Literature, so take note of that.) 

Hell of a Book made me think of another Nobel Laureate’s most important work: Toni Morrison’s Pulitzer-Prize winning novel Beloved. What Morrison did for the narrative of the enslaved, Mott has done for the Black Lives Matter movement. With this work, Mott explores one of the most important racial issues of the 21st-century–the seemingly-constant shooting of unarmed Black men by police officers–within the framework of the way in which Black citizens see themselves within the broader American social construct. Embedded deeply in the story is the ongoing, inescapable conversation about the construction of Black identity in a United States where Blacks seem to be hated because of the sins done to their ancestors by those who continue to hold the reins of power in an unequal and violent system. 

Read this book. I'm not scared to say, it is sure to be a classic.

The 2021 Booker Prize Winner

 The 2021 Booker Prize Winner is finally out in paperback, and I have been looking forward to reviewing it for you! First, however, a word from our sponsor, Leo Tolstoy: “All happy families are alike, but every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way” (Anna Karenina, 1878). This adage certainly applies to the Swart family. Can it also apply to countries?

Damon Galgut’s The Promise reifies the idea that “the third time's the charm.” This is the third time one of his novels has been shortlisted for the Booker Prize, and it is this nomination that has finally put him over the top and made him a winner. (Lamentations are offered for four-time nominee and zero-time winner Colm Toibin, who is consistently being mugged by the Booker judges.) Having not read the other novels on the shortlist, I am not in a position to say that this novel deserved it the most, but I can say that it is most certainly an appropriate addition to the pantheon of winners. (The Booker Prize has, for the last two decades, been one of the most solid book awards for novels written in English, so do not think that “appropriate” is some form of damnation through faint praise. When I say it deserves a spot in the Booker ranks, that is absolutely a compliment.) 

Yet, for all of the novel’s power and lyrical magic–Galgut’s prose flows with the liquid-like gentleness of good poetry–this is not a happy book. It is not intended to be, and I would never argue that there is no room for literature regarding sadness, pain, and loss; I would simply like to know, when I finish a book, that our shared journey through the heartache was leading to a destination that was worth the suffering along the way. I do not know that I feel that way about The Promise.

Well, without further ado, here we go: 

The Promise begins in 1987 in apartheid South Africa. Amor Swart’s mother, Rachel, exacts a promise from her husband on her deathbed: he must give their Black maid Salome the deed to the small house in which she lives. Why this is important to her is never explained, but Hermann (“Manie”) agrees, only to fail to live up to his promise. With the only witnesses to the promise being dead, Black, or Amor, the oft-neglected youngest child, it is an easy promise to ignore. Amor’s two siblings and the various aunts and uncles do not even believe Amor when she mentions the promise, and Salome is thus robbed of her inheritance. 

The rest of the novel is told through a series of time jumps, with family funerals serving as anchoring points by which the story continues. Over the course of thirty-one years, first Pa dies, then Amor’s sister Astrid, and finally her brother, Anton. Each subsequent funeral presents an opportunity, in Amor’s eyes, to set things right by giving Salome what she was promised, but her place of weakness and her geographic distance from the family robs her of any effective strength. I am a big believer in not spoiling a novel’s outcome, but I hope you will forgive me for telling you Salome does, eventually, get the deed to her home and the segment of land on which it sits. You need to know that because it acts as the ultimate climactic question of the novel, the question that gives the entire work its fundamental meaning: “What was the point of all of this?” 

If the point of the novel is to entertain, then it succeeds completely, but, still, what was the point of its narrative? What was the point of the fight to get Salome her home? What, ultimately, was the point of any of the lives that the members of the Swart family lived? Furthermore, there is a subtext to The Promise that seems to ask that same question– “What was the point of all of this?”--about South Africa itself. Each subsequent death after Rachel’s is tied to a historical event of some kind, but just as the passage of time diminishes the Swart family, Galgut tells an underlying story of how time has not been kind to South Africa, either. The reader sees the hope of the post-apartheid period fade away in a continual, erosive process of corrupt politicking, social disorder, and even climactic change. (Anton dies in 2018, just as Cape Town–where Amor lives–comes perilously close to running out of potable water.) This does not mean that members of the Swart family do not try to convince themselves that things have improved: Salome's greater physical and spatial presence at each subsequent funeral is used as a sort of proof that racial harmony is progressing successfully in South Africa, for all that the family still refuses to give the loyal maid the rights to her home. Each funeral further reveals a greater decay of the basic family unit, and the laying to rest of each Swart displays an escalation of misery, anger, and spiritual degradation as the dysfunctional family falls to in-fighting every single time they are in the same room.

Amor experiences her first period during her mother’s funeral, and ultimately enters menopause during her brother’s. The hope that Salome felt when the promise was exacted takes 31 years, the entire course of Amor’s childbearing life, to come to a fruition that ultimately seems to lack substance. While I would never suggest that having children is necessary to live a good life, the fact that Amor, the last of the Swarts, never has any is part of the failure of the family itself. Her “exemption” from motherhood dooms the family to extinction, and her status as the "Last Swart" is a pyrrhic victory in every way.

However good The Promise is, and believe me, it is more than just “good,” I find myself struggling for a surety of meaning. Can a narrative be just that–a summation of events that ultimately have no meaning? In a sense, I think the novel proves that, yes, indeed, such a narrative is possible because, tragically, that is the very nature of the Swart family’s lives. They are “sound and fury, signifying nothing.” (Macbeth, 1623), and so too, I think Galgut says, could be South Africa itself. It is a pretty strong argument to make, and while I am convinced of the symbolism, I am not sure of it. Surety comes only from speaking directly to the author himself.

That is the tricky thing about symbolism: you can think you know a thing, but that does not mean you actually know that thing. So, I recommend (request) that you read the latest Booker Award-winning novel, and try to answer that question for yourself. I look forward to hearing what you take from this incredible yet terrifying family history. Any thoughts--or disagreements--are heartily welcomed in the comments section below.