Seven Oaks Magazine.

In recent months, the literary world has been engaged in a debate – summarized and culminated in the New York Times Book Review of August 7, in an essay titled “Truth is Stronger than Fiction” – about the relative inability of the novel and short story to confront the realities of (deep breath, here; I have to drop a quarter in a jar every time I use this canard) our post-9/11 world. Sigh. Such luminaries as Ian McEwan and V.S. Naipaul weigh in on the subject, arguing in favour of non-fiction’s unique ability to meet the rigorous intellectual demands of the contemporary world. Given Naipaul’s famous hostility to Islam, of course, it’s not surprising that he’d be satiated by today’s headlines, while McEwan’s coy search for relevant, post-9/11 fiction is about as subtle as the famous chorus chanted by the Bay City Rollers: “S-A-T-U-R-D-A-Y…” Incidentally, and with great relevance to this particular review, perhaps the most sober assessment of the more-things-change quality of 9/11 that I’ve heard came from the world of hip hop, when rapper J-Live intoned:

Poet, emcee and novelist Adam Mansbach’s new book, Angry Black White Boy or, The Miscegenation of Macon Detornay marks a powerful argument for the continuing relevance of the novel in advancing meditation on, and exploration and enrichment of vital questions of contemporary political significance; in this case questions of race, class, culture, academia, history, gentrification and appropriation. Not only that, Mansbach’s novel is a case of precisely the opposite of current conventional wisdom: Angry Black White Boy is a work of fiction that successfully takes off from one of the most important books on race of the 1990s, William Upski Wimsatt’s essay collection Bomb the Suburbs, where Upski’s own (also non-fiction) follow-up, No More Prisons, failed completely.

Mansbach’s novel is intimately engaged with a particular section of Bomb the Suburbs called “Wiggers,” made up of four essays: “We use words like ‘Mackadocious’”[and other progress from the front lines of The White Struggle], “In Defense of Wiggers,” “Aren’t you in the wrong neighbourhood?” and “Hadn’t I just Been a special white boy?”. Both books steer clear of totalizing judgements in favour of exploring what the potentialities and possibilities are for white behavior when young men are forced to choose between the condescension of mimicking black culture or else embracing ‘their own’ hostile, racist whiteness.

The titular Angry Black White Boy is Macon Detornay, a young man whom Norman Mailer would recognize as the hip hop generation’s answer to the jazz era’s White Negro. Macon is a middle class, white, non-religious Jew from an affluent suburb of Boston, unsatisfied with the middling ‘blackness’ afforded him by a Star of David medallion (a direct nod to Upski, who cites a similar, autobiographical anecdote in Bomb the Suburbs). Macon sat at the black table in his high school cafeteria, shared copious amounts of weed with his black roommates, he loves hip hop and, as we meet him settling in to school at Columbia and a part-time job driving cabs, he is struggling with guilt drawn from his being the great-grandson of the man credited with segregating professional baseball. In one of the novel’s small inconsistencies, Macon is sometimes just as smart and sensitive as Adam Mansbach, and at other times he is not. Macon’s greatest flaw, however, is that he confuses ‘solidarity’ with ‘downness’; he conflates a thirst for justice with a desire to be cool (‘cool’ simply code for acceptance by hip black people) tragically, mixing style and substance, and substituting one for the other until the two are indistinguishable and have lost any integrity they might have had.

Transforming himself into a white Bigger Thomas/Robin Hood composite, Macon begins robbing his white passengers at gunpoint, and is surprised to find that each of them reports their assailant to police as being a black man, as a result of the anti-whiteness invective Macon hurls at them during the hold-ups. In the chapters that follow, Macon’s criminal notoriety thrusts he and two of his black friends (dubbed ‘the Race Traitor Project’) into the media maelstrom of American race relations, inciting riots, bemusement, guilt, anger and thwarted atonement in Macon’s ‘National Day of Apology.’ The story’s impressive challenges to the reader’s suspension of disbelief can be forgiven in the face of the far greater challenge presented to the wall of ‘simple truths’ surrounding any talk of black and white in the 21 st century.

In pointing out some of its enormous limitations – political, not aesthetic – Mansbach nonetheless fails to transcend all the problems of hip hop. Namely, like the rap with which he is dealing, the author is unable to find an important, realistic role for any woman in his story, and the attempts at creating any fall flat. His similes tended towards weakness, and the “code-switching” that the San Francisco Bay Guardian lauded in his last novel, Shackling Water, was tiresome here and left many passages prone to dating early.

Still, Mansbach’s poetic prose wraps itself around a compelling and engaging story, replete with jarring humour, action, and the kinds of complex human interactions that might only be illustratable in the world of fiction, where internal monologues of guilt, desire, resentment, history and condescension play out with far greater nuance than that which can be expressed in any headline.

In chronicling hip hop, one of the major cultural manifestations of American apartheid – one that many whites see as a loophole around racism while it is, in effect, often a plane for more of the same – Mansbach has created what will be an enduring and nuanced portrait of a certain type of whiteness, raising more questions than answers, and quietly reaffirming the central role to be played by fiction in sensitively, attentively and intelligently processing the world in which we lived and live, before and after the political debris of fallen towers.