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Summary
Summary
An intoxicating, provocative novel of appetite, identity, and self-construction, Darryl Pinckney's Black Deutschland tells the story of an outsider, trapped between a painful past and a tenebrous future, in Europe's brightest and darkest city.
Jed--young, gay, black, out of rehab and out of prospects in his hometown of Chicago--flees to the city of his fantasies, a museum of modernism and decadence: Berlin. The paradise that tyranny created, the subsidized city isolated behind the Berlin Wall, is where he's chosen to become the figure that he so admires, the black American expatriate. Newly sober and nostalgic for the Weimar days of Isherwood and Auden, Jed arrives to chase boys and to escape from what it means to be a black male in America.
But history, both personal and political, can't be avoided with time or distance. Whether it's the judgment of the cousin he grew up with and her husband's bourgeois German family, the lure of white wine in a down-and-out bar, a gang of racists looking for a brawl, or the ravaged visage of Rock Hudson flashing behind the face of every white boy he desperately longs for, the past never stays past even in faraway Berlin. In the age of Reagan and AIDS in a city on the verge of tearing down its walls, he clambers toward some semblance of adulthood amid the outcasts and expats, intellectuals and artists, queers and misfits. And, on occasion, the city keeps its Isherwood promises and the boy he kisses, incredibly, kisses him back.
Author Notes
Darryl Pinckney , a longtime contributor to The New York Review of Books , is the author of a novel, High Cotton , and the works of nonfiction, Blackballed: The Black Vote and US Democracy and Out There: Mavericks of Black Literature . He has also collaborated with Robert Wilson on theater projects, including an adaption of Daniil Kharm's The Old Woman . He lives in New York.
Reviews (5)
Publisher's Weekly Review
Two distinct settings-West Berlin and Chicago-serve as backdrops for this richly imagined second novel by Pinckney (High Cotton). Set in the 1980s, the story spans several years in the life of Jed Goodfinch, a young gay black man with a rehab stint in his past and an Isherwood-nurtured sense of Berlin as a site of intellectual and sexual liberation. "Like most American queers in West Berlin," he says, "I was in love with Weimar culture." In his late 20s, Jed, a lover of architecture, flees his native Chicago for Germany to work for N.I. Rosen-Montag, a famous and controversial architect on a "back-to-the-eighteenth-century-scale crusade." When the gig eventually falls through, Jed sticks around, having a cadre of fellow expatriates, part- and full-time lovers, and family-a second cousin, Cello, who embodies Berlin's "traditional high culture"-to rely on (or not). Occasional trips back to Chicago, where Jed's family is deeply involved in black society and politics, telegraph the ugly reality of race in America. In Berlin, Jed is "that person I so admired, the black American expatriate," but, in the White City, he's "an embodiment of a social problem, the old slander of what black men were like." Teeming with characters, historical minutiae, and observations on art, Pinckney's novel is a lively, inviting, and beautifully written story of survival by intellect. Agent: Rose Cobbe, United Agents. (Feb.) © Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.
Booklist Review
Every summer during the 1980s, Jed, a young, black, and gay Chicagoan, feels drawn to West Berlin. There he finds boys, booze, and drugs, then inevitably returns home heartbroken. Jed says he left pieces of himself in Berlin, like a bird carrying its feathers one by one to a distant nest, and he'll only find happiness when he lives there permanently. To that end, he secures a temporary job with a well-known architect and a room in his married cousin's home. But like every dreamer who moves to vacation paradise, Jed must deal with real life. His job prospects falter, love proves elusive, and other people's troubles and failings affect his plans. He even gets kicked out of his cousin's house and ends up in a co-op room with a bath down the hall. While the flow-of-consciousness writing and the scenes switching back and forth between Chicago and West Berlin can at times be disorienting, Pinckney's images of both cities and the people within them are vivid as he captures the time in which the two Berlins became one again.--Borman, Laurie Copyright 2016 Booklist
New York Review of Books Review
"IT DOESN'T ALWAYS start with a suitcase. Sometimes things begin with the wrong book." Thus opens Darryl Pinckney's haunting second novel, "Black Deutschland." The "wrong book" in question is Christopher Isherwood's "Berlin Stories," the literary source for the musical "Cabaret," and inspiration for Pinckney's protagonist to seek refuge in what became the unofficial capital of the Cold War. It's the early 1980s, and Jed, a young man from Chicago with an addiction problem, is trying to flee his hometown's suffocating racism and homophobia by expatriating himself to Berlin, a city he hopes will accept him and his desires as it did Isherwood's a half-century earlier. The lure of Europe as an escape (or at least vacation) from the strictures of AngloAmerican moralism goes back at least as far as Henry James, reaching its high-water mark with Hemingway and Fitzgerald, and in Britain with Isherwood. Their work, along with the mythmaking about the Lost Generation, has created a kind of permanent cultural romance with the idea that Paris, Rome and Berlin are more than physical cities. They are, or at least were, invitations to explore the repressed ele- merits of American selfhood. But for black writers and musicians, Europe has long meant more than loucheness. In the postwar era its cultural capitals held out the promise of a reprieve from the psychosis of white supremacy, a space for people like Richard Wright, James Baldwin, Dexter Gordon, Nina Simone and many others to practice and be appreciated first and foremost as artists, rather than actors conscripted onto the stage of America's endless race tragedy. As Jed puts it in "Black Deutschland," "I wanted to live where authority had little interest in black men." Few people know this history as well as Pinckney himself, who over nearly four decades of writing for The New York Review of Books has established himself as one of the leading critics of African-American literature, cultural history and politics, producing a body of work that easily deserves a book of its own. Along the way he wrote an acclaimed novel, "High Cotton," published in the early 1990s, a kind of postmodern bildungsroman in which the unnamed narrator, raised amid the black bourgeoisie of Indianapolis, dabbles in, satirizes, but most often simply avoids the various identities that his family, on the one hand, and a dominant white culture, on the other, are eager to slot him into. Thematically, "Black Deutschland" picks up where "High Cotton" left off, with a lost young man of the black upper-middle class, wherein businesses are owned and grandparents went to college, struggling in his "campaign for an adult life." But like many black artists before him, Jed finds the escape to Europe less than complete. The offer that brings him to Berlin is a vaguely defined position as a writer in the entourage of N.I. Rosen-Montag, an egomaniacal star architect who finds a black American an aesthetically pleasing addition to his hip young staff. In addition to being treated as an exotic at work, he has to face the condescension of his cousin Cello, a once-promising concert pianist married to a wealthy German industrialist. She has set herself up in Berlin as a member of the culturad, and views her younger cousin as a charity project whom she must help to "salvage" from his travails with booze and boys. She gives him the maid's room, and Jed suspects she has told her gorgeous biracial children to keep their distance. It's a testament to the subtlety of Pinckney's casually erudite style that the reader barely notices the depth charges being eased into the water in the book's opening sections. The facts are there - how Cello's father lost his mind during the civil rights movement, how Jed's mother then forced her into becoming a "Negro Achiever," "the personification, however unwilling, of racial uplift through art." But these bits of background are offered with such disarming directness that you pay more attention to Jed's slightly bitchy commentary on his cousin's perfect hair and fashion sense, thus making you complicit, as so much of this beguiling novel does, with Jed's own avoidance of himself and his past. Like Isherwood's book, famous for Sally Bowles and the other ne'er-do-wells of Weimar night life, the German portions of the novel are written in short, journal-like sections that jump between the demimonde of the ChiChi, a dive bar for black expats, where Jed stays off white wine but takes up hash, and the semi-ridiculous world of high-theory architecture, neither of which leads him to the gorgeous boys of his dreams. When Cello's husband, Dram, asks Jed to leave their house following the discovery of cocaine in his bathroom (which it will turn out was Cello's, not his), Jed makes a trip back to Chicago to regroup, and the emotional heart of the novel begins to open up. The rest of the book moves back and forth between the two cities, revealing along the way the multilayered, ultimately tragic story of the family that produced these two cousins and drove them along very different roads to the same place. CUTTING BETWEEN PAST and present, the Chicago chapters are a brilliantly exact and unsentimental portrait of the hidden tax that American racism has always placed on black ambition. Back in the day, Jed's mother was a tireless committee-woman of the civil rights movement, taking indigent women into her house, while insisting on achievement for her sons, and particularly for the gifted Cello. His father helped run a black community newspaper that was begun by his wife's family in the 1930s but is now quickly becoming obsolete. After encountering violent white resistance to ending housing discrimination at the demonstration in Marquette Park in 1966, his father physically restrained Jed's mother from joining the protests at the Democratic National Convention two summers later. Back home in Chicago, Jed knows he has sorely disappointed both of his upstanding parents by losing his sobriety, becoming that "old slander of what black men were like." Without a hint of sloganeering, Pinckney evokes in these scenes a melancholia that transcends his narrator, achieving something rare in fiction - an honestly-come-by sense of cultural and political sadness. The family's house is a "pack-rat outpost" that is "lined with rib-cage-high shelves of oversize illustrated books about black American history, Africa, television, the stockyards and baseball, along with an encyclopedia" from the year Jed's older brother was born "and a set from the year I was born. . . . We were the lobby of a bygone rooming house or the waiting room of some settlement charity." It is this stifling history of canceled promise that drives Jed back to Berlin, fantasizing that in that city "you were going to turn a corner and there in the neon haze would be the agent of your conversion," preferably one of the "white boys who wanted to atone for Germany's crimes by loving a black boy like me." As in "High Cotton," Pinckney is at his funniest when deadpanning about fashionable radicalism. In one marginal apartment where the bathroom door has been removed in the name of a "liberated lifestyle," he waits until his roommate is "dead to the world before I visited the lesbian's toilet-for-the-emancipated." He eventually joins a left-wing co-op next to the Berlin Wall, where his lack of Marxist theory isn't a problem given that, to the white members, "the color of my skin was my radical politics." If the novel has a weakness, it's in lavishing a bit too much attention on the secondary characters in and around the coop, some of whom never come into clear focus. The strongest through line remains Jed's quest for the fulfillment of a desire in the present strong enough to keep the undertow of Chicago and the memories it holds at bay. His search will come to partial fruition, Berlin will keep its "Isherwood promises," but the city holds more in store for him, and for Cello, than his literary dreams could comprehend. It is in the final images of Jed and his cousin later in life, their relationship still fraught because "our stories allowed for nothing else," that "Black Deutschland" achieves its full, devastating power. In her recent book "Citizen," the poet Claudia Rankine describes an adaptation some African-Americans make to the conditions of racism: "They achieve themselves to death trying to dodge the buildup of erasure." In two novels now, Darryl Pinckney has explored characters who decline this route, who opt instead to try to absent themselves altogether from the absurd choice between "Negro Achiever" and the "slander of what black men were like" - a choice imposed by this country's need to enforce with violence the illusion of whiteness and its virtue. In the process he's made a significant contribution to American fiction. The hero lets his parents down by becoming that 'old slander of what black men were like.' ADAM HASLETT'S new novel, "Imagine Me Gone," will be published in May.
Kirkus Review
He's black. He's gay. He's a recovering substance abuser. And he's running around Berlin during the 1980s. For the most part, Pinckney's novel succeeds at being as intriguing as its premise. His name is Jed and, like the protagonist of Pinckney's 1992 debut, High Cotton, he's a young, ferociously intelligent product of an accomplished African-American family based in the Midwest; in this case, Chicago, where he finds himself constricted and chafing. Restless for adventure and reinvention, Jed seeks both in West Berlin during the final decade of its walled-off existence. Invoking the name of Christopher Isherwood, he declares at the start that gay sex, even with the advent of AIDS, is what beckons him to Germany. "Berlin," he says, "meant white boys who wanted to atone for Germany's crimes by loving a black boy like me." He spends several summers in Germany, staying with his cousin Cello, an imposing, imperious classical pianist. By the time he decides to stay there for good, Jed has gone into rehab and fights off temptations to reacquaint himself with white wine and designer drugs. At one point in his odyssey, he works as a writer for a celebrated architect whose ambitious proposals to rehabilitate whole sections of Berlin mirror Jed's own attempt to forge a bold new identity. Meanwhile, he seeks out Alcoholics Anonymous meetings with black soldiers; engages with the burgeoning, multicultural nightlife in seedy, neo-bohemian bars; falls in and out of love, sometimes requited, sometimes not. Those looking for a straightforward narrative path toward self-discovery will not find it here. The story shifts back and forth from Chicago to Berlin, from Jed's adolescence to adulthood. What sustains your attention throughout these sometimes-disorienting transitions is Pinckney's dolefully witty and incisively observant voice, whether describing the quirks of his hero's family ("When the going gets rough, make pancakes," Jed's father advises) or evoking the sights, sounds, and even smells of West Berlin, "the involuntary island, that petri dish of romantic radicalism." Pinckney's discursive novel, coming across as if it were a late-20th-century hipster version of Rilke's The Notebooks of Marte Laurids Brigge, typifies an era in which inventive, idiosyncratic styles flourish anew in African-American writing. Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Library Journal Review
In his debut novel, High Cotton, Pinckney created a narrator who resists the reductive racial identity thrust upon him by society and embarks on a journey to define his individualism against and within the historical truth of his family, race, and upbringing. Similar themes run through this novel, as we follow Jed Goodfinch, a recently sober, young, gay black man in search of intellectual and psychological redemption in the fading days of West Germany. Escaping his native Chicago to live with his second cousin, Cello, Jed accepts employment with a renowned architect with an eye toward rebuilding Berlin in prewar stylings. In an attempt to restructure both the city and his own fragmented identity, Jed enters liminal stages of transition from addiction to sobriety and American to expat as Germany undergoes reunification. Meanwhile, his complicated but stable family structure crumbles, forcing Jed to close the physical and emotional distance between his new life in Berlin and his childhood roots in Chicago. -VERDICT In a narrative that intersperses humor with literary parables, Pinckney successfully prods at the protected and tightly bounded yet fraught arena of self-actualization and identity. [See Prepub Alert, 8/3/15.]-Joshua Finnell, Los Alamos National Laboratory, NM © Copyright 2016. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.