FFWD REW

A B-plus is enough

Novel entertains but could have more bite

Exasperated because his best friend since high school African-American Chris Jaynes demands that they carry the 200-year-old skeletal remains of a half-breed Crow Indian on a makeshift sled to escape extinction aggravated unemployed Detroit bus driver Garth Frierson mocks him “You’re a weird dude Chris.”

And simply by scanning the surface Jaynes the protagonist and narrator of Mat Johnson’s Pym must be nuts.

Why is Jaynes “a weird dude”? A contributing factor lies in the distinctive physical characteristic that Johnson creative writing professor at the University of Houston shares with Jaynes: “A point of plot and order: I am a mulatto.” Professor Johnson’s upbringing alienated from both racial extremes in his bipolar black-and-white world of northwest Philadelphia empowers him to create fictional Professor Jaynes fired by an upstate New York lily white college for disregarding their official African-American curriculum to speculative academic research unearthing “the pathology of Whiteness.”

Curiously the tone of Pym feels neither moody nor macabre. Stocked with colourful characters not only across the black upwardly mobile demographic spectrum but also from Johnson’s own creation of a fantastic oversized science-fiction species of snow-and-ice-dwelling humanoids.

The unexpected bonus of exquisitely random commercial landscape painter Thomas Karvel Pym echoes the contemporary situation-comedy “literary cartoons” by American novelist T. Coraghessan Boyle. Engineering pandemonium via the clash of unique social types Johnson like Boyle choreographs blunt loud and comedic slapstick ballets that make poignant sociological statements which entertain readers who want to laugh.

Such amusement notwithstanding Pym does not represent lightweight diversions. Johnson constructs Pym as he constructed another of his novels Hunting in Harlem creating structured episodes custom designed for the attention spans of students who watch TV and the sound bytes of professors who spoon-feed case studies for animated in-class discussion.

Pym entertains. What Pym does not do is what Johnson’s first novel Drop did: Pym does not grab the bull by the balls then scream in its face.

B+ Professor Johnson — but please keep writing.

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