Trelawney, the second-generation Jamaican American protagonist of Jonathan Escoffery’s debut short story collection, If I Survive You, is obsessed with identity — his identity and the identity of everyone else he encounters. From suburban Miami-Dade County to the Midwest to Jamaica and then back to Miami, this obsession with knowing who he is and what he is haunts him. As we follow Trelawney on his identity walkabout, we are bombarded with descriptions of skin complexions and eye colors and hair waviness, as if the only factors that matter in creating a personal identity are surface-level attributes. The collection’s first story, “In Flux”, documents Trelawney’s identity obsession from pre-teen to college graduate.“It begins with What are you? Hollered from the perimeter of your front yard when you’re nine — younger, probably.” The whole collection begins, and ends, unfortunately, with this identity obsession, at the expense of deeper characterization and nuance.
Escoffery, a Miami native, is a talented writer, who especially shines in terms of plot and structure. Two of the book’s stories are tightly plotted 40-pagers. But his usage of “identity” as a crutch and false generator of pathos weakens an otherwise strong debut effort. Writing about identity is a worthy task, and it has a long literary tradition. But Escoffery, through Trelawney, paints a very black-and-white picture in the collection’s more blatantly identity-obsessed stories, even as he is obsessed with shades of gray, and every shade and hue in between. Beginning with “In Flux,” when Trelawney leaves Miami for college in Minnesota, he encounters white characters whose sole purpose is to display their problematic “whiteness” and justify their narrative positioning as identity-obsessed cliches. Trelawney dates a pair of Katies, both of whom are in “their mid-thirties and seem to be going through the same crisis that led them to date you in the first place.” One of the ladies, enamored with Trelawney’s lips, says that “they’re like plush little pillows. Thank god they’re not chapped and burnt-looking.” The other Katie says something equally ridiculous. But it doesn’t matter what it is, because neither of the Katies are characters but rather props used by Escoffery to construct his ideologically heavy-handed fictions.
It’s not a problem that Escoffery’s white women make outlandish racially charged comments — people such as them often do in real life. But it is an issue from a literary perspective when characters, no matter their racial compositions, have nothing else to offer other than cliches. The stories, intended to provoke, end up utterly predictable. As soon as a white character is introduced, her “whiteness” will induce predictably awful behavior. Yawn. A character is supposed to contain some individuality. That’s the idea of a character.
The issue isn’t that Escoffery’s stories are explicitly ideological but that he’s so blinded by the negative and all-encompassing effects of “whiteness” that he ends up fetishizing the white characters in the manner that black characters have been historically fetishized. Two stories in particular, “Odd Jobs,” in which Trelawney answers a Craigslist ad for a woman who’s “never had a black eye” and “wants to see what it feels like,” and “If I Survive You,” in which a rich white couple hires him to watch them have sex, are extremely over the top and ridiculous in their treatment of the white characters. What’s striking is that a writer as inventive as Escoffery uses the same plot device in both stories, namely the Craigslist ad. It’s almost as if he was thinking so little of the white characters and their agency that it doesn’t matter that he deploys the same narrative cliche in both stories. Escoffery is right to think that it doesn’t matter, because if your characters are absolute cliches who represent nothing more than malignant “whiteness,” then it doesn’t matter if they’re introduced in a cliched manner.
“Odd Jobs” and “If I Survive You” both have provocative conceits, and Escoffery was clearly attempting to invert racial power dynamics. But the stories ultimately fail because they amount to nothing more than woke, which is to say, pandering, provocations. It is painfully boring and telegraphed from the start that the white characters will treat Trelawney like nothing more than a “brown body,” which comes to fruition when the couple in “If I Survive You” ups the stakes and demands that he wear a “hoody and baggy jeans” during his voyeurism session. This might titillate the self-hating white audience that devours woke literary fiction, but the more nuanced reader understands what is happening here. In creating white characters that function as nothing more than bad examples of “whiteness,” Escoffery is feeding his woke white audience exactly what it wants.
It is no coincidence that the rave reviews for If I Survive You have almost exclusively been written by woke white female critics who have commented on the book’s subversiveness and scathing commentary on identity. Escoffery might not give his white characters exactly what they want in If I Survive You, but he certainly serves it up to his white readership on a pandered platter.
If I Survive You shines when Escoffery shifts his focus to the fraught relationship between Trelawney and his older brother, Delano — with his hometown of Miami as the backdrop. South Beach often passes for all of Miami in the country’s imagination, but the truth is that the “real Miami” — suburban Miami-Dade County — where most locals live and work, is the heart of the city. The “real Miami” has been ignored by Hollywood and the literary world, but with If I Survive You, Escoffery remedies this issue and hopefully signals the beginnings of a South Florida literary renaissance. The collection isn’t the first book to feature the “real Miami.” How to Leave Hialeah by Jennine Capo Crucet earned that distinction. But If I Survive You captures Miami’s strangeness better than any piece of art to date. Escoffery clearly knows Miami, and he is comfortable writing about the city, which is why the sections that take place in deep Miami-Dade County are the strongest.
The bulk of the Miami-based stories, such as “Pestilence,” in which Trelawny and Delano wage war on the bugs and vermin that assault the “only plot of American soil my parents purchased together,” take place in Cutler Ridge, a Miami-Dade County suburb only known to locals. It is in neighborhoods such as Cutler Ridge where the difficulties of the immigrant experience and questions of American identity are most affecting and ripe for fictional renderings. It is in Cutler Ridge, and other neighborhoods like it, that Miamians such as Trelawney are formed.
In “Pestilence,” as the brothers deal with a “cursed” home, “not simply from the outside but from within,” their dynamic is forged. Delano, on account of his more traditional Jamaican looks and manner, is his father’s favorite son. While Trelawney, bookish and more Americanized, is the black sheep. The collection’s throughline is their battle over the family house in Cutler Ridge, which is destroyed at the end of “Pestilence” when Hurricane Andrew devastates the neighborhood. Delano and his father rebuild the house. But the land, and the immigrant story it represents, are forever cursed.
Miami is a fitting backdrop for identity-based fiction because the city, due to its multicultural nature, is a liminal space. Escoffery, when he isn’t concerned with “whiteness,” makes a far more compelling case for the difficulties of living with dual and triple identities when he focuses on the ways in which so-called POC treat and mistreat one another in a fractured multicultural city. In Miami, questions of identity and race aren’t intellectualized in the manner of the woke whites that Escoffery attempts to pass off as fully rounded characters in the book but treated with a far more honest and fictionally rich bruteness. When Trelawney’s cursed house is destroyed during Hurricane Andrew and he moves to Broward County, he attends a new school and joins up with a crew of “brown boys.” The boys are Puerto Rican and assume that Trelawney, due to his lighter complexion, is also from the island, until they realize that he doesn’t speak Spanish. He’s then kicked out of the group. But when Trelawney attempts to link up with the Jamaican boys, they don’t consider him a “real” Jamaican, and so “members of both groups go out of their way to trip you in the halls or knock over your lunch tray.” This nuanced depiction of identity-based dislocation is far more compelling than the cliched “whiteness” as antagonist lever that Escoffery pulls whenever he’s in need of heightening the emotional stakes or wants to beat the reader over the head with politically correct talking points.
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If I Survive You is a fascinating collection because its faults speak to the overriding issues that plague the literary scene. “POC” writers such as Escoffery, who’ve been credentialed and reared by elite writing programs and institutions, know where their bread is buttered. Everywhere they look, it’s white classmates and white literary agents and white editors and a lily-white readership. But the trick is to not pander to, or worse yet, clumsily villainize your biggest supporters, even if that’s what gets them off. In Escoffery’s case, his supporters get off on being villainized. But maybe Escoffery is having his cake and eating it too, what with all his recent success and critical acclaim. But real Miami guys know what he’s up to. He surely knows, too, and he’s surely surviving, and thriving, thanks to all those white ladies and their “whiteness.”
Alex Perez is a fiction writer and cultural critic from Miami. Follow him on Twitter: @Perez_Writes.
