If I Survive You is the next-to-last book for my 2023 Booker Prize shortlist project. It is a novel of linked stories centered around Trelawny, a young man of Jamaican heritage, and his family.
This novel is about identity. First, racial identity, as Trelawny’s school friends try to fit him into the categories they’re familiar with in Miami. He looks like one of the Cuban kids but can’t speak Spanish. He’s too light to be black. And what language is his mother speaking, anyway? (It’s English.)
Then, it’s family. His parents split up when he’s still young, and his father takes his older brother, Delano. His father has always been awkward around him anyway, because Trelawny prefers reading to sports and has no friends. Much later, when he is living with his father after his mother returns to Jamaica, his father calls him “defective.”
Family is also an issue for his cousin, Cukie, whose father left when he was a child. Later, when Cukie is a teenager, his father begins to take him for the summer and he learns to catch lobster. He begins to believe he can do this for a living until he learns what kind of man his father really is.
And place is also a theme. Trelawny doesn’t feel at home in Miami, but he certainly doesn’t blend in at his midwestern college. After college, he bounces around between his father, his brother, and homelessness, but neither of his relatives seem to want him around. Then he becomes obsessed with buying the family home from his father even though it is falling apart.
This novel seems dire at times, but it is also darkly funny at times. It is probably autofiction and also slightly whiny. He certainly hasn’t grown up with any advantages except an education, but he also makes some spectacularly bad decisions.
By the way, most of the book is written in second person, but not second person addressing someone else as “you,” rather the narrator addressing himself. I got used to this, but I could see that it might be irritating.
What? Me Read? 