If I Survive You is the debut collection of linked short stories by American writer Jonathan Escoffery. It arrives heralded by glowing, well-earned praise from the likes of Ann Patchett and Marlon James. Investigating the internecine tensions of a Jamaican-American family in Miami, its riches are plentiful – Escoffery’s prose regularly stopped me in my tracks.
Topper and Sanya fled to the US in 1979 after political violence “back home”. Across these eight tales, the alienated men of the family – Topper, along with sons Trelawny and Delano and their extended relatives – observe each other with sidelong suspicion. They wonder of each other and of themselves, “What kind of man is he?” They worry about the kinds of inheritance – material and emotional – they might pass on.
At the heart of the novel is a fresh reading of colourism: as “light-skinned” Jamaican immigrants frequently mistaken as having Latino origin, the family struggle to secure footing within the Black community. But they aren’t exactly welcomed by mainstream white society either.
Predominantly, Escoffery comes back to the relationship between Delano, the eldest son, and his younger brother Trelawny. We follow the pair as they vie for the restorative reassurance of their father’s attention, and as they hustle in a society and economy pitted against men of colour.
Escoffery writes masterfully and with depth of feeling in both Patois and “standard” English. He is also brilliant at swooping from the conversational to the profound in a single sentence. In the titular story, during a disorienting and disastrous hook-up of sorts, Trelawny thinks: “You are on the couch, listening to the grinding of salt for tequilas… Do what might divert you from the path to self-destruction: forgive yourself.”
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His vibrant imagery lights up hard-bitten prose with a touch of otherworldliness; the book is infused with a mythical quality. In “Pestilence”, plagues of crabs and locusts beset the fractured family’s suburban home, just before a hurricane rips off the roof.
At first glance, the lobster-catching expeditions in “Splashdown” that occur as “the sun’s apex breaks the horizon as a fiery pinpoint” repair ruptures between cousin Cukie and his absent father, though they become something altogether less wholesome as the narrative progresses.
It is in the titular tale – the final one in the collection – where
Escoffery’s talents for drawing together multiple narrative threads and finding pathos within absurdity are showcased most beautifully.
Here, Trelawny’s finances are in chaos and his housing situation is in peril. His girlfriend is at her wit’s end with him. His brother and father are unable and unwilling to offer the emotional support he hungers for. The head of faculty at the school where he teaches has essentially told him that his Black hair might encourage antisocial behaviour among students.
The answer to his mesh of problems comes in the form of a “kinky” white couple – “perverse puppeteers” – intent on fetishising Trelawny’s Blackness as they pay him to participate in a series of deeply uncomfortable role plays.
This story is typical of Escoffery’s Miami – a city full of smooth-tongued promises that turn out to be swindles, a place full of dreams of sun-drenched success that give way to brutal storms. Yet his characters’ continual self-examination helps them make their way through all the intensity and strangeness in the end.
In Escoffery’s astonishing, compassionate entrance to the literary scene, the family come to understand that being truthful to oneself really is the only way that one can get by.
If I Survive You by Jonathan Escoffery is out on 2 February (HarperCollins, £14.99)