If I Survive You (2023)

Why this one?

This is another one on the 2023 Booker Longlist, from which I’m cherrypicking a few books that grab my attention. This was another less-than-informed choice, based mostly on spotting a few celebrated Booker alumni praising it (notably Percival Everett, author of last year’s should-have-been winner The Trees and Marlon James, who won a few years back with the excellent A Brief History of Seven Killings)

Jonathan Escoffery (born c. 1981) was born in Houston to a newly-arrived Jamaican family and grew up in Miami. He wanted to be a writer from a fairly young age, and initially planned to study journalism at Florida International University. However, he got married and dropped out, finding himself working multiple jobs and struggling to find time to write. He returned to FIU at 24, and began to make contacts and understand what he wanted to do as a creative writer. He was subsequently accepted to the prestigious writer's programme at the University of Minnesota, and following his graduation moved to Boston where he began teaching creative writing and founded the Boston Writers of Color group. At this point he began writing and submitting some of the stories that would become If I Survive You. In 2020, 'Under the Ackee Tree' won the Plimpton Prize and was published in the Paris Review. He has subsequently been nominated for multiple awards.

Thoughts, etc.

If I Survive You is a mostly linked short story collection, based on the immigrant experience of a Jamaican family who moved to Miami following the turbulence in their home country in the 1970s. For much of the book, our focus is the somewhat autobiographical-seeming life of Trelawny, the family’s younger son, though we do also get stories told from the perspective of his father, his older brother Delano, and in the biggest departure of the collection, his cousin Cukie. The book deals with the struggle of survival in the face of everyday racism in the US, exacerbated by crises both personal and national - the latter including the major (and disproportionately racialised) impact of Hurricane Andrew and the 2008 Financial Crisis.

The first story, ‘In Flux’ sets the tone in a number of ways, and is one of the strongest in the set. It focuses on Trelawny as a youth, trying (and repeatedly failing) to find his place in the world, not for the last time unable to satisfactorily answer the question ‘who are you?’. Racially ambiguous in appearance, he is undoubtedly Black to the white majority who wield the greatest influence on his life, but not sufficiently so to blend in with his contemporaries, who are forever mistaking his background. ‘Jamaican’ as an identity never seems to be a satisfactory identity, either to others or to Trelawny himself. This first story also introduces a powerful use of the second person which recurs through much, though not all, of the novel. As has been pointed out elsewhere, this has a doubly powerful effect, both in the relatively common sense of drawing in the reader to empathize with the character, but also here in emphasizing Trelawny’s alienation from himself. Even more unusually, it’s handly so deftly by Escoffery that it never feels forced or just plain annoying, as I’ve often found with second-person narratives.

Elsewhere the dive into his father’s viewpoint (and past) is also strong and a voice I’d like to have heard a little more of throughout the book. Delano by contrast I found less engaging, both in his own stories and as a foil for Trelawny. The story that stood out by a mile for me though was ‘Splashdown’, which jumps off from a very brief reference to the brothers’ cousin Cukie into an entirely different story, disconnected from the rest in setting and style (though not entirely in theme, for sure.) In it, the focus is squarely on Cukie’s quest to get to know his absent father, and discover ‘what kind of a man he is’. For much of the story, this is ambiguous - his father comes to play a valuable role in his development, but this later unfurls to the point where he is left questioning whether he ever had any real handle on the answer to that question. It’s a sparkling standout of the collection, and while it does take you out of the unity you’d normally expect from a Booker-eligible ‘novel’ I think it retains enough thematic ties for it to be a more-than-acceptable presence. There is in fact a call back to the ‘what kind of a man’ question in the very next story, as Trelawny questions his own life choices…

Speaking of which brings us on to some of the most divisive sections in the book, those in the ‘Odd Jobs’ story where Trelawny is employed by a woman to punch her in the face, and the later story in which he is hired (largely because of his race) as a voyeur by a white couple, with whom he becomes more entangled. These sections do stand out as being particularly challenging, and skimming the GoodReads reviews seem to have put off a fair number of readers. It’s understandable in a sense as they are jarring moments, the rest of the stories dealing in general with more relatable, everyday moments of struggle for the family, but with these taking things in a much wilder and more troubling direction. For me, they almost worked, but not quite.

My criticism is less that they were uncomfortable (though of course they, intentionally, were) and more that they were brief and unsustained threads. These are the bits that reminded me most of the books I’ve so far read by Perceval Everett, and that’s very definitely a good thing, but in Everett’s work those more challenging stories are sustained to ludicrous, riotous and kind of mindblowing levels, whereas here they feel like tentative steps into those worlds. To be more positive, though: I think here, they need to be taken as just a few more episodes in a multifaceted narrative, through which Trelawny becomes increasingly inured to the madness of what he must endure. In a collection that begins with the powerful but conventional pressures of a teenager’s search for identity, the rest of the book takes us on a journey showing that challenges big and small, personal and political, mundane and weird, all accumulate and add to the impossibility of this immigrant family living anything like a ‘normal’ life.

Score

8

I think there are flashes of brilliance here, and as a linked short story collection it’s a really interesting journey with some real high highs (as well as some more forgettable bits.) I’ll definitely be looking out for more from Escoffery, but right now this isn’t quite on the same level as a Booker winner as most of the other longlist entries I’ve sampled. I wouldn’t be massively surprised to see it make the shortlist, but I wouldn’t be overly gutted if it didn’t.

Next up

I think my last longlist read before the shortlist is revealed on the 21st will be Sarah Bernstein’s Study for Obedience.