Dreams sunk into soil

In 2020 Jonathan Escoffery won the Paris Review’s Plimpton prize for his story “Under the Ackee Tree”. Written in the second person, in Jamaican patois, the tale reappears in Escoffery’s debut, If I Survive You – a “novel-in-stories”, according to this year’s Booker prize committee, who recently shortlisted it for this year’s award. Straddling two literary forms, Escoffery has something in common with his protagonist, Trelawny, the American-born son of immigrant parents who fled political violence in Jamaica for a new life in Miami. Trelawny, whose older brother, Delano, was born in Jamaica, is struggling to figure out how he fits into American life, with its polarized take on race.

“It begins with What are you? hollered from the perimeter of your front yard when you’re nine – younger, probably”, Escoffery writes at the start of “In Flux”, which opens the book: an astute use of the second person to draw in anyone who has ever wondered about their identity and belonging. “The few decidedly Black kids in school find you befuddling. They are among the first to insist that you state your allegiance. ‘Are you Black?’ they demand. You’re a rather pale shade of brown, if skin colour has anything to do with race.” When the family flees Miami-Dade after “a hurricane named Andrew pops your house’s roof open, peeling it back like the lid of a Campbell’s soup can” – Escoffery has a good line in figuration – Trelawny’s new classmates assume he is Puerto Rican until it emerges that he doesn’t speak Spanish. But then settling for being Black proves less simple than it sounds.

To compound Trelawny’s crisis, his feckless father, Topper, walks out on him and his mother, Sanya, taking Delano with him. This betrayal fuels the father-son conflict at this novel’s heart – a conflict Escoffery revisits in his fifth story, “Splashdown”, in which we meet Delano and Trelawny’s cousin, Cukie, who has an errant father of his own. As Trelawny grows up his search for somewhere he can call home becomes practical as well as emotional: he spends most of the time living out of his car, a member of the “nouveau hobo” class. Meanwhile, his actual family home – which has been patched up by Topper, a builder by trade, along with the teenage Delano (still, at the time, in the process of “constructing manhood”) – ends up slowly sinking into the soil: a metaphor for the collapse of his family’s American Dream.

Escoffery’s episodic approach works well, up to a point. The flexibility allows him to be formally and stylistically inventive – jumping from the second to the first and third person; from past to present and future; from witty, conventional prose to Jamaican patois and Black Americanisms – but the repetition of material as he fills in the gaps for readers new to his set-ups gets tedious. Many of these stories were clearly written as standalones, and the edges haven’t always been smoothed for their conversion into novel form. Moreover, key characters such as Trelawny’s mother, who escapes the family collapse by moving halfway across the world, feel underdeveloped.

Escoffery’s varied prose carries flashes of multitudinous writers, from Caleb Azumah Nelson, who used the second person to explore his Black protagonist’s struggle in Open Water (2021), to the sunshine noir of Carl Hiaasen to Lauren Groff, particularly in the sense of impending environmental reckoning that hangs over her collection Florida (2018). But Escoffery is also very much himself: a supremely talented, funny writer whose light touch can enliven even the bleakest situation. When Trelawny, still living in his car, finally gets a job, the best thing about it is not the “food security, the dignity of work or the promise of upward mobility”, but “having a toilet on which to sit and unload your twisted, clogged-up colon without having to fake it like you’re planning to buy that Double McFuckery with fries”.

The book’s accusatory title is also the title of its final story. Trelawny, who now teaches at a charter school, has moved in with Delano, who lives in the original, now sinking family home. Neither brother wants the other one there. Desperate for some extra cash so he can buy the house from his father, Trelawny takes the oddest of odd jobs: watching a couple in bed. Matters come to a stormy head in an ending that is cathartic and instructive – and, for those who care about literary taxonomy, turns this collection of stories into something like a novel.

Susie Mesure is a freelance book critic, interviewer and feature writer

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