Fifty Books Project 2023

 

Welcome to Braggsville by T. Geronimo Johnson

 

Since that visit, Daron had entertained very few thoughts of Charlie.  Fewer than few, he had to admit, turning his mind over and finding himself to have been agitated by only one query.  Idée fixe.  This constancy of theme was of no solace.  No, not at all, not when it traveled brothers in arms with a rabid and merciless frequency, tugging at this hems, cuffs, collars like a child with a limited vocabulary who will have his chocolate bar or, oxygen be damned, return to the womb.  (That’s crazy, D!) Likewise, erudition be damned, so D’aron’s mind assaulted him with this artless inquiry.  And explanation be damned, he ignored the incessant reiterations, attributing them to – horror!! – ego!!. ego!!? [And that horror paled, appalled as it was by the guilt of C/catholic – yes, both majuscule and minuscule – guilt of C/catholic dimensions (with apologies to Louis ten-time-hella-ten-times over.  For we were to shed Freud like diapers, were we not?  For we were to transcend the institutions attendant psychic impositions were we not?  For we were to walk upright, were we not?  Or we were to be slapped straight up in the dick with this hefty textbook, to, Give us something to motherfucking crouch about!) LeggoMyego!!, No!!, EgoLeggoMe!!, LeggoMe!!, dammit!]

 

It is a standard trope in literary analysis to look at texts in terms of content and form.  They are  either working together or in opposition to each other.  Just a few weeks ago in this space, I was praising Colum McCann’s Apeirogon for so successfully working form in the service of content.  And often I complain that a novel serves up simple plot without the sauce of style.  It is rare that a novel is spoiled by too much attention to style and form, but in this case, the author’s legitimate ability to call up linguistic fireworks at will detracted from content that should have been compelling, but was, in the end, a chore to sift through.

 

D’aron (usually, but not always, with the apostrophe) Davenport is a working-class white man from the small town of Braggsville, 2 hours southeast of Atlanta (and hence close to the center of that state).  His mother is a homemaker, his father works in a local factory.  He has been brought up to love football, hunting, barbecue and to be proud of things Southern.  Some of those lessons have not taken, however, and D’aron has always felt out of place, even with cousins JoJo and Quint, genuine good-ole-boys who revel in that life. D’aron has grown fond of chess, of literature and of school in general.  Too odd for Braggsville, he has passed up a chance to attend University of Georgia (this is referred to as “becoming a Bulldog”) and travelled three thousand miles to University of California at Berkeley.

 

There he has become friends with a typically diverse group of liberal intellectuals – a Malaysian everyone assumes is Chinese, a white daughter of University of Iowa professors who claims Native American ancestry, and a gay black man who, while also of working-class roots, has been a scholarship student and become comfortable with the privileged who attend Berkeley.  They read Judith Butler together and take classes that discuss “performative interventions” - guerilla theater-like protests such as bringing fake human ashes to a Six Flags ostensibly built on Native American land to bury an ancestor.  When the professor discusses Civil War reenactments in this context, and D’aron mentions that his hometown has a weeklong “Patriot Days” festival that includes a reenactment, the three friends agree to travel home with D’aron to disrupt the festival with such an intervention:  they plan on dressing as slaveowners and their enslaved workers to stage a mock lynching.  

 

This is a long set up for a visit to Braggsville that could have been compelling because Johnson has us follow D’aron’s consciousness as he sees his hometown through his friend’s eyes and his friends though the town’s eyes.  D’aron begins to find some of the shame he felt at his own Southerness is misguided.  He has to ask his mother to remove the black lawn jockeys from the front of the house, but his friends find his family warm, likeable and interesting.  Not only do they not embarrass him, but he feels how well they make his friends feel at home.  He also recognizes the arrogance in their plan to intervene in the reenactment – which he learns his father will have nothing to do with anyway.  Even while there is genuinely funny satire here, we get real characters and a well-drawn portrait of this town.

 

The intervention goes horribly awry.  The harness that is supposed to support Louis who – in blackface – acts the part of the uppity slave malfunctions and Louis is actually hung.  Or perhaps the reenactor’s step in and whip Louis for real, breaking the harness and causing the hanging.  Or perhaps Candice has not set the harness correctly and then panics and runs away.  None of the people who are there are able to give coherent testimony.  In fact, little about the event gains any coherence.  The black community of Braggsville (whom D’aron knows nothing about) treats him like a hero.  The reenactors treat him like a pariah (and have his father moved to the night shift).  The FBI is convinced that the reenactment is a front for an actual militia, which D’aron knows nothing about until he does.

 

D’aron becomes a man without a hometown – he cannot go back to Berkeley as the time spent on inquest and investigation have caused him to miss most of the semester; he cannot stay in Braggsville after he is definitively asked to leave by the militia.  Where will he go?  What can we learn from all this?  I am not sure because Johnson’s proclivity for complex parenthetical interruptions that chase down side issues, add bits of exposition, or just play with words and puns in bizarrely complex sentences renders the prose – what?  Not incomprehensible – no, there are passages that are confusing, but also rich and musical.  For example, the passage quoted above is from the end of the novel when Charlie (the black friend) has confessed to being gay and D’aron is trying to decide if Charlie might have had a crush on him and how he, D’aron, might feel about that.  It is nowhere close to central to the plot.  It is thematically linked to D’aron’s (and Charlie’s) character development, but so tangential that it feels trivial and as a reader I wondered why I was being concerned with that when D’aron had plenty of other conflicts to continue struggling with –  which he had been doing at proportional length and proportional ambiguity for more than 200 pages.  I had despaired of seeing D’aron reach any understanding or any understandable lack of understanding and did not want to concern myself with the narrator’s playful dissection of his sexual tensions.  

 

There were moments throughout when the plot became compelling – the adjustment to Berkeley, the revelation of bringing his friends home, the death of Louis, D’aron’s trip to the black side of town, the revelations about his redneck cousins. But as the pages multiplied, I learned that these situations would never raise questions worthy of straightforward clarity.  That none of the questions would ever be considered more valuable to explore than Johnson’s talent.  That while I viewed the substance of the novel as of equal importance to its style, in this case, I was alone.