You wake up and discover your friend in your kitchen, boiling eggs and reading your copy of Jonathan Escoffery’s If I Survive You. You debate. Is it autobiographical? A novel or a short-story collection? Does the book, like the protagonist, seem unhappy with whatever it is? Why does Escoffery use the second-person point of view so much?
Why, indeed? As I’m sure you can tell, the second person risks being contrived, distracting, presumptuous, scratchy, puerile and self-conscious. Just don’t do it, writing instructors warn. Unless you’re Escoffery, a young American in whose hands the second person is arresting, intimate, adventurous, attuned, sophisticated and, yes, still self-conscious.
If I Survive You is a stylish debut of eight linked short stories set mostly in Miami during a recession. It advances in short, impressionistic scenes, and much like viewing a Seurat, you’re lured in by the dazzling surface before needing to step back for relief. The most striking stylistic feature is the second-person point of view, couched within an urgent present tense, though occasionally accessorised by long stretches of a conditional/future tense or Jamaican English. It’s a layered look: “If you marry she, you will have garden wedding, and you will design your suit and pay tailor to stitch it nice.”
For the most part, the collection follows Trelawny, a racially ambiguous Black man, who is constantly served the question: “What are you?” His economic and romantic prospects are dim. He has no stable friendships. His family is a case study in marital estrangement, parental favouritism and sibling rivalry.
Just give the boy some security, some freedom and a sense of belonging and much of his angst would evaporate. But, no, his father thinks he is “defective”. For a period, he must live in his car. He cycles through diasporic Blackness, hoping to find home among Dominicans, Puerto Ricans, Cubans, Jamaicans and Americans. As a student in the midwest, Trelawny is so desperate for community that he hops in a cab and instructs the driver: “Take me to Black people.” He is disappointed by what he finds. Every failure, every rejection, stings the reader as much as it stings Trelawny. After all, Escoffery delivers it all to you.
Obviously, the second person brokers empathy between reader and character – you put yourself in Trelawny’s shoes. Less obviously, because you essentially stands in for I, it confirms the estrangement Trelawny feels from himself. He cannot convincingly narrate from the I position because that would presume that he inhabits a self. It’s a genius move, when you consider it. Escoffery could have been content to tell these stories in a straightforward way – they’re weighty enough to hold our attention – but his exaggerated stylishness takes us beyond wan empathy to identification.
Escoffery resists polarising race into Black and white (or reducing varieties of Blackness into one, for that matter). He details and challenges the social violence that threatens to grind the self-concept of racialised people into perversions of whiteness. Caitlyn, a Chinese American woman, confides in Trelawny: “I guess I feel too privileged not to be white.” At a party, three women of Mexican, Jewish and Argentinian backgrounds chant: “We’re white, we’re white, we’re white,” to comfort themselves after being ostracised by white midwesterners.
Escoffery’s interracial sensitivity, coupled with the courage to move beyond the politeness that silences meaningful conversations on race, creates moments where I wanted to snap my fingers, like at a poetry slam. Trelawny has dinner with his girlfriend’s racist family, a humiliating affair where the mother points at him every time she refers to the colour black. His girlfriend, Jelly, does not defend him. Instead, she deploys the rhetoric of tolerance: “Jelly said, ‘You just have to give them time,’ as though racism were a phenomenon best outwaited.” Snap.
As the underdog against the monstrous antagonists of racism and poverty, morality becomes extra weight when Trelawny is in survival mode, hanging on to an unethical job for the privilege of “a toilet on which to sit and unload your twisted, clogged-up colon”. It’s hard to like Trelawny at his most unscrupulous. And then one remembers that Black people should not have to be heroic in order to live ordinary lives. In the final pages, the collection surges with the symphonic, imaginative, propulsive energy of Gabriel García Márquez into a vision of a possible future for Trelawny. We find ourselves resisting it because our fate is wrapped up in his, and we trust that Escoffery will not flatten his characters – or us – into statistics.
• Ian Williams is the author of Disorientation: Being Black in the World. If I Survive You by Jonathan Escoffery is published by 4th Estate (£14.99). To support the Guardian and Observer order your copy at guardianbookshop.com. Delivery charges may apply.
