Escoffery, Jonathan. If I Survive You. McClelland and Stewart, Toronto, 2022.

This is the last of the six Booker fiction shortlist I’ve read. I think it’s one of the better ones but frankly none of them in my opinion deserve the prize. Here we have a series of linked and sequential chapters that stand alone as short stories but aggregate into a full-length novel. The author is an engaging writer but a bit trendy for my taste (a lot of cool reference to acronyms, one of the chapters rendered in patois). He was born in the US of Jamaican parents and was apparently a PhD candidate when he wrote this.

The first chapter In Flux is an engaging intelligent discussion of race with a light ironic tone:

“It sounds like you’d prefer if people treated you less like a generalization and more like a human being. Like how White people treat White people.” She bites her lip cautiously, then says, “Right.” “And your outward appearance is the only thing preventing this from becoming a reality.” “Exactly!” she says.

Race, you know, is a social construct. It can’t be measured, because it doesn’t exist—biologically. If the results had shown 99 percent European and 1 percent African, as long as your skin held some degree of brown and your hair still coiled, you’d still be Black and only Black by American standards.

Later chapters follow narrator Trelawny as an arts university graduate who is considered by his dad impractical and inferior to his brother. Brother gets a house from the dad. Trelawny is broke and takes on strange employment from on-line personals, lives out of his car, then lands a steady job helping a landlord deal with (and to some extent fleece) elderly renters.

Splashdown is a strong chapter about Trelawny’s cousin Cukie, interpolated in Trelawny’s story. It feels a bit like an orphan. Cukie, Trelawny’s cousin, connects with his estranged dad who runs a fishing charter in Florida and who roughly teaches his son some lessons about life and being a man. But as far as I can tell the dad doesn’t later want to be rediscovered and abandons Cukie far out at sea, which is the last we hear of him. I wondered whether that incongruous deadly evil was an awkward shot at an already indifferent fatherhood.

Trelawny who finally seems to have a serious girlfriend (having let us know that he has no trouble connecting with women) eventually probably prevails in his battle with his brother over the house the dad provided but loses the girl.

All this sustained my interest in the face of mild discomfort over what felt like an unconvincing environment of hard times and bad luck. Trelawny never seemed seriously threatened, with his self-effacing irony and cool romantic charm. I think the most compelling and interesting section was musing about racial ambiguity in that first chapter.

An interesting read but I don’t think I would have started it and would probably have dropped it halfway through if it hadn’t been for its place on the Booker shortlist.

7.9/8.5