There is a moment in Bystander – the sixth story in Witness, Jamel Brinkley’s second collection – when a family pauses in the middle of a heated argument to listen to the tune played by their rice cooker. The daughter, Dandy, has told her social media followers that she wished she had the means to have the president assassinated; her mother, Anita, who scrutinises Dandy’s habits of eating, speech, and dress obsessively while failing to conceal the fact that she is doing so, is desperate to impress on her daughter that “her dual burdens, being Black and female, meant she had to be more careful and intelligent than any other sort of person”; while Anita’s husband, Horace, tries to be more droll and serene in his panic as he doles out “sweeping fatherly wisdom”. “Before Dandy could protest, the rice cooker beeped out a tinny version of Twinkle, Twinkle, Little Star. Everyone listened quietly, almost respectfully; for some reason the device’s little tune was sacrosanct.”
Witness is an extraordinary gathering of stories that confirms Brinkley’s place among the most moving, compelling and virtuosic practitioners of the short form. The holy pause occasioned by this appliance’s tinny tune captures something precise and intimate about what a family can share even in the midst of the complex generational disputes that are one of Brinkley’s recurrent preoccupations. The space hollowed out by the beeping nursery rhyme, around which the three characters fall silent for a spell, becomes a version, a tiny exemplification, of what Brinkley’s stories manage to achieve. Like all the finest exponents of the short form, from Isaac Babel to Alice Munro, the scope and scale of the works collected in Witness is a central feature of their achievement: each is a brief and localised gathering akin to the trio suspended around the rice cooker, an experiment in the lives that can be held together – both the characters’ and the reader’s – by the tune of Brinkley’s words.
Brinkley’s first collection, 2018’s A Lucky Man, was notable for what felt like a deliberate and tactical refusal, in the early years of Trump’s presidency, to allow the terms of its exploration of Black American lives to be set by the disgraces of the present. “It was back in those days”: these are the opening words of its opening story, and the collection as a whole often darted back to its protagonists’ childhoods, hovering between present and past. Witness is more explicitly orientated towards the present moment: the online complications of Bystander; the seriocomic absurdities of Brooklyn’s ongoing gentrification in Blessed Deliverance; the human depletions of the gig economy in Sahar. As the title of the collection suggests, Brinkley repeatedly poses the question of the responses that these scenes demand, the noting and noticing that the stories at once embody and complicate (the narrator of The Let-Out is quite typical in proclaiming: “I was not the kind to be noticed”). The flight into the past seems more culpable in these stories than in Brinkley’s earlier work: it is Dove, the narrator’s hapless and tragic DJ brother-in-law in the eponymous final tale, who is “full of nostalgia” and “seemed to find solace in calling forth and repeating the past”.
What Witness has in common with A Lucky Man, and what seems above all to define the particular brilliance of Brinkley’s artistry with the short form, is his ceaseless conjuring of the small groupings that crystallise the predicaments and joys, the folds and the creases, of contemporary life, and Black American life in particular. I could not think of another writer who creates such a varied and riveting series of pairings and couplings as he proceeds: not just romantic and sexual partners, parents and children, or siblings, but uncles, aunts, and in-laws, a young man and his father’s erstwhile lover, an older woman and the young female delivery driver who haunts and eludes her. The human duo, the dyad, appears in Brinkley’s stories as both the most meaningful and mobile of configurations, the best possibility for forms of Black life to flourish and proliferate amid the un-shoulderable pressures bearing down upon them, and as impossibly fragile, evanescent, no coupling ever more than a short tale. The exquisite melancholy of Brinkley’s stories resides in the duality of these possibilities and doubts, the giving of form to the lives that they contain while doubting the worth and the possibility of such a gift.
In what was, for me, the most remarkable story in Witness, a reconfigured ghost story titled Arrows, the narrator considers himself “good-for-nothing” because, like his mother’s spectre: “I too could find some minuscule thing to pour all of my attentions into.” Witness, alert to the risks of such myopia, simultaneously reinvents it as writerly and worldly practice, as care. “So much is made about the importance of achieving depth in human interactions,” comments the narrator of The Let-Out, seeming, at least in this moment, to articulate one of Brinkley’s guiding convictions: “but what about the delicate surface, what about the skin?”
Witness by Jamel Brinkley is published by 4th Estate (£16.99). To support the Guardian and Observer order your copy at guardianbookshop.com. Delivery charges may apply
