I wonder what you think of the American Society of the Magical Negro. It doesnt fit into this category of identity politics since it's technically *supposed* to be about anti Blackness and the stress of managing white people's emotions. But the film is basically an incoherent rom com where the director thought it was a mic drop moment because white people were uncomfortable saying the word negro as they bought tickets to see the film.
Even though I agree with your assessment, my more cynical take is that Black creatives dont have anything interesting to say. When the director of American Fiction had convinced himself that he's addressing white racism by making this film, there's no plot. It reminds me also of Dear White People which also supposed to be about white racism but ends up following a mixed race girl with a lukewarm response to white racism at a PWI.
A few things here is that I think Black elites are so far removed from racism that they cant really identify it (much less respond to it), a lot of Black and white people prefer Blacks to talk about race all the time/eveywhere (ie I saw a Black bookstagrammer listing books that explicitly tackle the horror trope of the Black person dying first - which isnt anywhere near as prevelant now as maybe the 90s or early 00s in horror).
I think the fixation to have Black people address anti Blackness all the time everywhere (a compulsion that many politically engaged Black people DO have) creates works that are ultimately really contrived and dont offer anything meaningful for the Black audience it is technically intended for (ie anything Lena Waite has ever done). So the work may appeal to the racially sensitive white liberal in part because it doesnt have anything to say about race, is tackling a nonexistent problem or is bad but has Black people so you cant dislike it without being called racist.
This is what I think about when I saw American Fiction (which FELT dated; lackluster cinematography) but I did really enjoy all the performances and found it very funny. I just was meh on the race stuff!
ASMN looked god-awful right away from the trailer, so I'm not surprised it was both a critical and commercial bomb. It seemed to make American Fiction look like Erasure, haha.
I threw in that line about how this new black culture reminds me a lot of Asian American culture because it's something I've noticed for a long time, but haven't fully fleshed out yet. What do you think about that? Many of the tropes that dominate AsAm culture (at least at the "elite" level) are those of a group who've mostly made it, but just can't bridge the final 10% divide that separates them from their elite white peers. So they angst and angst and angst over that, and come to believe that their personal melodrama over this is the most fascinating narrative that their community has to offer.
My initial response is that this specific thing happening in literary publishing might be the only place where Black and Asian interests or experiences converge. Like, Yellowface seems to be the only book by an Asian author that Black bookstagrammers have read that isnt manga or a popular translated book from South Korea or Japan. And they like it for the superifical reasons: racist white lady + race (which is compelling to Black identity enthusiasts). Even the title, Yellowface, is a derivative of Blackface, which provides an entrypoint for race fixated Black readers.
I wonder if the angst you talk about is borne from a fear of upsetting Black people. For me, all roads kinda lead back to us since we have been in the US for 500 years and have a long history/body of work. From your piece about Asian rage, I realized that the things you mentioned are at odds with Black identity politics. I think you mentioned more policing. Black liberals enjoy supporting Asians superficially since our communities have no overlap, but if Asians came out and said what they actually want, this could alienate the group of people who not only outnumber them but possess a larger platform (comparatively). In fact, Asians co-opt Black ethnonationalistic language and concepts all the time.
So I think a general focus on white people and angst around them is politically neutral, white liberals have created a "demand" for it and there doesnt seem to be any widespread pushback on these types of books so there's no incentive to do anything different.
The app wont let me edit my comment?!? I wanted to add that for a lot of Black people, their understanding of being Black and anti Blackness increasingly comes from the internet.
I do experience racism, and many Black people do, but the depth and intensity of it varies. With the end of Jim Crow, gone are the days where all Black people regardless of class experience the same type of exclusion and violence at the hands of whites.
But I think this is difficult to come to terms with, so we get movies about things that havent been relevant since the 90s or early 00s. Or at least. The people who make these movies dont know enough to offer more saliant examples of anti Blackness.
Appreciate you taking some time to think through VICTIM, Chris! It's funny, I've heard from people saying I went too far, and others saying I didn't go far enough. Personally, I'm happy both views exist because from my vantage point I just wrote the best book I could. Hopefully, like you said, it cracks the door open a bit. Looking forward to seeing what comes next.
I checked out Erasure from the library entirely on the strength of the Avaricia excerpt, which - you are correct! - is very funny. (Part of the comedy, I think, is that this isn't Everett pastiching "Precious," this is Everett pastiching an over-educated intellectual parodying "Precious" and trying to amuse himself while he's doing it.)
Boryga's book, well, he seems like a pretty cool guy on this site, although I guess this review gives me pause. I don't know if you've ever read Xochitl Gonzalez's first novel (or maybe her second, which I am vaguely fascinated by - I think one of the first pieces I would write on Quiara's Hypothetical Newsletter would be about her "oeuvre") but the least satisfying aspect of that book is the rotten white love interest character who is basically a sentient series of finbro Twitter bio hashtags, who exists as an obvious symbol of the protagonist losing her identity in the upper class. (Not one for subtlety, X.G. has named this character "Dick.") I worry from your description that Anais is the girl version of that, and that seems perhaps beneath this type of novel. And I'm not just saying that because I am arguably an IRL Anais :P
Some aspects of Olga Dies Dreaming are really obviously rooted in Gonzalez' real life (there is a particular passage about the Williamsburg Savings Bank which felt like it had been ripped directly out of my thoughts) ... but then mixed in with that you have the ridiculous plot with Scooby-Doo villain real estate moguls, and paragraphs and paragraphs of too-credulous characters explaining "Gosh, the Young Lords - they were kind of like the Latino Black Panthers, weren't they?" for the benefit of white people making a Diverse Authors shelf on Goodreads. I have not yet read "Anita del Monte Laughs Last" and thus cannot weigh in on the controversy surrounding the book (whose title character is based on a very real and very dead artist whose family was not consulted at all, and is fucking pissed about it) but judging just from the premise it seems that Gonzalez has chosen her lane, so to speak. Anyway, all this to say that "Victim" feels very similar, given your description, to "Olga Dies Dreaming" - Whither the Boricua Ivy Leaguer!? - and it doesn't surprise me that the two authors would be simpaticos on those grounds.
I made a similar comment to a friend of mine who recommended "American Fiction":
"The irony is that 'urban fiction' isn’t really a draw in the publishing world anymore. Everett’s novel satirizes a trend which was current at the time of publication (early 2000s) but today publishing houses looking for 'authentic Black voices' are more likely to publish…something like Erasure."
1. "In the movie, Thelonious “Monk” Ellison is a struggling black novelist who contemptuously (and pseudonymously, as Stagg R. Leigh) writes an outrageously stereotypical black novel, My Pafology, out of frustration at how such books do so well. In Erasure, the author of that rival book (We’s Lives In Da Ghetto) is named Juanita Mae Jenkins, while in American Fiction, she is rechristened as Sintara Golden. Much to Monk’s shock, a huge bidding war breaks out for his new book, and because he needs the money to take care of his ailing mother, he takes the deal and assumes double identities."
The Spike Lee movie "Bamboozled" comes prominently to mind. Also, this:
2. "Just look at how palpable Erasure’s Monk’s seething hatred of the mainstream publishing world is in My Pafology, where Van Go is listing all the children he plans to have:
I dreams when I’m sleepin and it be on an island somewhere in them islands down there. There be all these beautiful, fine-ass bitches walkin round wearin nuffin but strings over they nipples and shit. I think, damn, these some fine bitches here and I know they gone give me some and I start countin the babies I’m gone make and I start thinkin up names for them babies. Their names gone be Avaricia, Baniqua, Clitoria, Dashone, Equisha, Fantasy, Glinique, Hobitcha, I’youme, Jamika, Klauss, Latishanique, Mystery, Niggerina, Oprah, Pasticha, Quiquisha, R’nee’nee, Suckina, Titfunny, Uniqua, Vaselino, Wuzziness, Yolandinique and Zookie.
I laughed at this aloud, but then I was made uncomfortable by why I laughed. Is it because I knew the passage was patently ridiculous? A brilliant satire! Or subconsciously, maybe I didn’t think it was? Maybe deep down, I thought there were actually some black people who do think like this, and I found that uproarious?"
It's funny because one can easily imagine overeducated white liberals lapping this shit up. It confirms their priors, even though anyone with as much sense and worldly experience as a kitten whose eyes have been open for all of two days could see that it's a steaming crock.
I remember when J.T. LeRoy came out with that abominable novel. I was living in europe at the time, and european pseuds bought into it, hook line and sinker, because it confirmed their priors.
I come from a background where I actually know something about rednecks and truck stops and I am not entirely gullible, so I read about two pages before I called "bullshit". I got accused of insensitivity and victim-blaming, butm needless to say, J.T. LeRoy was 169% pure hoax.
The only way I got through "Sarah" was by pretending that I was reading a crude form of magical realism, or maybe an experience to see just how gullible overeducated humans really are.
Is Anais in “Victim” a comic character? Do people actually talk like that and understand themselves in that way? I guess perhaps they do. I’d like to read those sections you mention just to see how she’s presented.
She's an outline of a familiar type of person: the woman who gets into social justice for popularity and clout, and whose radical principles frequently get trumped by her desire for an affluent lifestyle. She's not so much a comic character as she is a character we don't get enough time to spend with, which makes her come off like a caricature. She's definitely insufferable and I wouldn't want to be friends with her, but I would've loved to see in-depth how a relationship between 2 frauds like her and Javi would play out over an entire novel.
There was no way Victim could have gotten published without pulling a lot of punches. A quick look through the profiles and pictures of literary agents on a manuscript wishlist site reveal the VAST majority of them to be exactly the types of people the novel is criticizing. The traditional publishing world is not Substack. It is very much still in the late 2010s culturally, they do not tolerate heterodoxy, and I guarantee you none of them look back on their Instagram black-out photos from 2020 with even the slightest publicly acknowledged embarrassment. Victim will need to be a major bestseller for anyone to go after them with more teeth.
My mental model of wokeness writ large is as a kind of secularized protestantism centered around different variations of bio-egalitarianism/blank-slatism. That in turn is downstream from human rights as a moral framework writ large, a kind of universalist set of moral precepts.
So while it's easy to critique the excesses of this kind of moral system around the margins, it doesn't get anywhere close to real subversiveness because the core value-sets are the same for both the person being critiqued and the novelist critiquing them.
Every moral order has its own tranches of true believers and performative hypocrites, and pointing up hypocrisy - which is what most of these books do - does not constitute meaningful subversion.
A more substantive variation of the PMC-hypocrisy critique would be class-based, but class conflict has really receded as a force of cultural energy when everyone is aspirational.
I wonder what you think of the American Society of the Magical Negro. It doesnt fit into this category of identity politics since it's technically *supposed* to be about anti Blackness and the stress of managing white people's emotions. But the film is basically an incoherent rom com where the director thought it was a mic drop moment because white people were uncomfortable saying the word negro as they bought tickets to see the film.
Even though I agree with your assessment, my more cynical take is that Black creatives dont have anything interesting to say. When the director of American Fiction had convinced himself that he's addressing white racism by making this film, there's no plot. It reminds me also of Dear White People which also supposed to be about white racism but ends up following a mixed race girl with a lukewarm response to white racism at a PWI.
A few things here is that I think Black elites are so far removed from racism that they cant really identify it (much less respond to it), a lot of Black and white people prefer Blacks to talk about race all the time/eveywhere (ie I saw a Black bookstagrammer listing books that explicitly tackle the horror trope of the Black person dying first - which isnt anywhere near as prevelant now as maybe the 90s or early 00s in horror).
I think the fixation to have Black people address anti Blackness all the time everywhere (a compulsion that many politically engaged Black people DO have) creates works that are ultimately really contrived and dont offer anything meaningful for the Black audience it is technically intended for (ie anything Lena Waite has ever done). So the work may appeal to the racially sensitive white liberal in part because it doesnt have anything to say about race, is tackling a nonexistent problem or is bad but has Black people so you cant dislike it without being called racist.
This is what I think about when I saw American Fiction (which FELT dated; lackluster cinematography) but I did really enjoy all the performances and found it very funny. I just was meh on the race stuff!
Thanks for the thoughtful reply, Kitty!
ASMN looked god-awful right away from the trailer, so I'm not surprised it was both a critical and commercial bomb. It seemed to make American Fiction look like Erasure, haha.
I threw in that line about how this new black culture reminds me a lot of Asian American culture because it's something I've noticed for a long time, but haven't fully fleshed out yet. What do you think about that? Many of the tropes that dominate AsAm culture (at least at the "elite" level) are those of a group who've mostly made it, but just can't bridge the final 10% divide that separates them from their elite white peers. So they angst and angst and angst over that, and come to believe that their personal melodrama over this is the most fascinating narrative that their community has to offer.
Oh you're welcome! :D
My initial response is that this specific thing happening in literary publishing might be the only place where Black and Asian interests or experiences converge. Like, Yellowface seems to be the only book by an Asian author that Black bookstagrammers have read that isnt manga or a popular translated book from South Korea or Japan. And they like it for the superifical reasons: racist white lady + race (which is compelling to Black identity enthusiasts). Even the title, Yellowface, is a derivative of Blackface, which provides an entrypoint for race fixated Black readers.
I wonder if the angst you talk about is borne from a fear of upsetting Black people. For me, all roads kinda lead back to us since we have been in the US for 500 years and have a long history/body of work. From your piece about Asian rage, I realized that the things you mentioned are at odds with Black identity politics. I think you mentioned more policing. Black liberals enjoy supporting Asians superficially since our communities have no overlap, but if Asians came out and said what they actually want, this could alienate the group of people who not only outnumber them but possess a larger platform (comparatively). In fact, Asians co-opt Black ethnonationalistic language and concepts all the time.
So I think a general focus on white people and angst around them is politically neutral, white liberals have created a "demand" for it and there doesnt seem to be any widespread pushback on these types of books so there's no incentive to do anything different.
Are you a cat?
The app wont let me edit my comment?!? I wanted to add that for a lot of Black people, their understanding of being Black and anti Blackness increasingly comes from the internet.
I do experience racism, and many Black people do, but the depth and intensity of it varies. With the end of Jim Crow, gone are the days where all Black people regardless of class experience the same type of exclusion and violence at the hands of whites.
But I think this is difficult to come to terms with, so we get movies about things that havent been relevant since the 90s or early 00s. Or at least. The people who make these movies dont know enough to offer more saliant examples of anti Blackness.
Appreciate you taking some time to think through VICTIM, Chris! It's funny, I've heard from people saying I went too far, and others saying I didn't go far enough. Personally, I'm happy both views exist because from my vantage point I just wrote the best book I could. Hopefully, like you said, it cracks the door open a bit. Looking forward to seeing what comes next.
I checked out Erasure from the library entirely on the strength of the Avaricia excerpt, which - you are correct! - is very funny. (Part of the comedy, I think, is that this isn't Everett pastiching "Precious," this is Everett pastiching an over-educated intellectual parodying "Precious" and trying to amuse himself while he's doing it.)
Boryga's book, well, he seems like a pretty cool guy on this site, although I guess this review gives me pause. I don't know if you've ever read Xochitl Gonzalez's first novel (or maybe her second, which I am vaguely fascinated by - I think one of the first pieces I would write on Quiara's Hypothetical Newsletter would be about her "oeuvre") but the least satisfying aspect of that book is the rotten white love interest character who is basically a sentient series of finbro Twitter bio hashtags, who exists as an obvious symbol of the protagonist losing her identity in the upper class. (Not one for subtlety, X.G. has named this character "Dick.") I worry from your description that Anais is the girl version of that, and that seems perhaps beneath this type of novel. And I'm not just saying that because I am arguably an IRL Anais :P
A trusted friend of mine did not have flattering things to say about Olga Dies Dreaming, but I am kind of curious. Perhaps we can read jointly haha
Some aspects of Olga Dies Dreaming are really obviously rooted in Gonzalez' real life (there is a particular passage about the Williamsburg Savings Bank which felt like it had been ripped directly out of my thoughts) ... but then mixed in with that you have the ridiculous plot with Scooby-Doo villain real estate moguls, and paragraphs and paragraphs of too-credulous characters explaining "Gosh, the Young Lords - they were kind of like the Latino Black Panthers, weren't they?" for the benefit of white people making a Diverse Authors shelf on Goodreads. I have not yet read "Anita del Monte Laughs Last" and thus cannot weigh in on the controversy surrounding the book (whose title character is based on a very real and very dead artist whose family was not consulted at all, and is fucking pissed about it) but judging just from the premise it seems that Gonzalez has chosen her lane, so to speak. Anyway, all this to say that "Victim" feels very similar, given your description, to "Olga Dies Dreaming" - Whither the Boricua Ivy Leaguer!? - and it doesn't surprise me that the two authors would be simpaticos on those grounds.
I made a similar comment to a friend of mine who recommended "American Fiction":
"The irony is that 'urban fiction' isn’t really a draw in the publishing world anymore. Everett’s novel satirizes a trend which was current at the time of publication (early 2000s) but today publishing houses looking for 'authentic Black voices' are more likely to publish…something like Erasure."
I kind of want to read that Sag Harbor novel now, actually.
1. "In the movie, Thelonious “Monk” Ellison is a struggling black novelist who contemptuously (and pseudonymously, as Stagg R. Leigh) writes an outrageously stereotypical black novel, My Pafology, out of frustration at how such books do so well. In Erasure, the author of that rival book (We’s Lives In Da Ghetto) is named Juanita Mae Jenkins, while in American Fiction, she is rechristened as Sintara Golden. Much to Monk’s shock, a huge bidding war breaks out for his new book, and because he needs the money to take care of his ailing mother, he takes the deal and assumes double identities."
The Spike Lee movie "Bamboozled" comes prominently to mind. Also, this:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ev373c7wSRg
2. "Just look at how palpable Erasure’s Monk’s seething hatred of the mainstream publishing world is in My Pafology, where Van Go is listing all the children he plans to have:
I dreams when I’m sleepin and it be on an island somewhere in them islands down there. There be all these beautiful, fine-ass bitches walkin round wearin nuffin but strings over they nipples and shit. I think, damn, these some fine bitches here and I know they gone give me some and I start countin the babies I’m gone make and I start thinkin up names for them babies. Their names gone be Avaricia, Baniqua, Clitoria, Dashone, Equisha, Fantasy, Glinique, Hobitcha, I’youme, Jamika, Klauss, Latishanique, Mystery, Niggerina, Oprah, Pasticha, Quiquisha, R’nee’nee, Suckina, Titfunny, Uniqua, Vaselino, Wuzziness, Yolandinique and Zookie.
I laughed at this aloud, but then I was made uncomfortable by why I laughed. Is it because I knew the passage was patently ridiculous? A brilliant satire! Or subconsciously, maybe I didn’t think it was? Maybe deep down, I thought there were actually some black people who do think like this, and I found that uproarious?"
It's funny because one can easily imagine overeducated white liberals lapping this shit up. It confirms their priors, even though anyone with as much sense and worldly experience as a kitten whose eyes have been open for all of two days could see that it's a steaming crock.
I remember when J.T. LeRoy came out with that abominable novel. I was living in europe at the time, and european pseuds bought into it, hook line and sinker, because it confirmed their priors.
I come from a background where I actually know something about rednecks and truck stops and I am not entirely gullible, so I read about two pages before I called "bullshit". I got accused of insensitivity and victim-blaming, butm needless to say, J.T. LeRoy was 169% pure hoax.
Never heard of this J.T. LeRoy. Now I'm intrigued. Thanks for letting me know!
Weirdly enough, I watched Bamboozled way back at a 7th grade sleepover. I don't know what we were thinking lol.
The only way I got through "Sarah" was by pretending that I was reading a crude form of magical realism, or maybe an experience to see just how gullible overeducated humans really are.
Is Anais in “Victim” a comic character? Do people actually talk like that and understand themselves in that way? I guess perhaps they do. I’d like to read those sections you mention just to see how she’s presented.
She's an outline of a familiar type of person: the woman who gets into social justice for popularity and clout, and whose radical principles frequently get trumped by her desire for an affluent lifestyle. She's not so much a comic character as she is a character we don't get enough time to spend with, which makes her come off like a caricature. She's definitely insufferable and I wouldn't want to be friends with her, but I would've loved to see in-depth how a relationship between 2 frauds like her and Javi would play out over an entire novel.
There was no way Victim could have gotten published without pulling a lot of punches. A quick look through the profiles and pictures of literary agents on a manuscript wishlist site reveal the VAST majority of them to be exactly the types of people the novel is criticizing. The traditional publishing world is not Substack. It is very much still in the late 2010s culturally, they do not tolerate heterodoxy, and I guarantee you none of them look back on their Instagram black-out photos from 2020 with even the slightest publicly acknowledged embarrassment. Victim will need to be a major bestseller for anyone to go after them with more teeth.
Fantastic piece!
My mental model of wokeness writ large is as a kind of secularized protestantism centered around different variations of bio-egalitarianism/blank-slatism. That in turn is downstream from human rights as a moral framework writ large, a kind of universalist set of moral precepts.
So while it's easy to critique the excesses of this kind of moral system around the margins, it doesn't get anywhere close to real subversiveness because the core value-sets are the same for both the person being critiqued and the novelist critiquing them.
Every moral order has its own tranches of true believers and performative hypocrites, and pointing up hypocrisy - which is what most of these books do - does not constitute meaningful subversion.
A more substantive variation of the PMC-hypocrisy critique would be class-based, but class conflict has really receded as a force of cultural energy when everyone is aspirational.