If I Survive You

April 1, 2022

This debut from Plimpton Prize winner Escoffery links together sharply conceived scenarios to tell the story of a Jamaican family striving to make it in Miami. As they survive hurricane, recession, marital breakup, lousy houses, subpar jobs, and discrimination, they wrestle with issues of self and identity; here they are Black, while back home folks say they're no longer Jamaican. At the narrative heart is younger son Trelawny, figuring out how to survive. A buzzing debut and at first glance refreshingly original and caustically beautiful; with a 100,000-copy first printing.

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Starred review from June 6, 2022
Escoffery’s vibrant and varied debut, a linked collection, chronicles the turbulent fate of a Jamaican American family in Miami. Trelawny, the main character in most of the entries, is the younger of two sons. He questions where his light skin places him within America’s racial categories and where he fits into family hierarchy: “You want to prove your father bet on the wrong son,” Trelawny narrates in the title story, addressing his father’s favorable treatment of his older brother, Delano, an arborist and musician. “In Flux” recounts Trelawny’s liberal arts education as he leaves Miami and attends college in the colder, and more racially homogenous, Midwest. “Odd Jobs,” “Independent Living,” and the title story center on the strange and ethically dubious gigs Trelawny takes to survive, including a running stint as a voyeur for a rich Miami couple, asking himself all the while: “What kind of employee are you? And just what kind of man?” Two stories exert a thrilling dramatic pull: In “Splashdown,” Trelawny’s cousin Cukie learns the lobster trapping trade, and something darker, from his estranged father; and “If He Suspected He’d Get Someone Killed...” follows Delano rushing to secure a bucket truck and a tree-trimming contract before a dangerous storm arrives. This charged work keeps a tight hold on the reader. (Sept.)Correction: Due to an editing error, this review originally published without its star.

Starred review from August 1, 2022
First-time author Escoffery's collection of interconnected stories confirms his already prize-winning status. Jamaican Americans living in Miami, Trelawny and his family are routinely asked, ""What are you?"" His parents speak English that no one understands, their light skin must signify some Puerto Rican or Cuban heritage, his mother says they are mostly European, and his father says they aren't Black, they are Jamaican. Things become further complicated when Trelawny's father moves out, taking Trelawny's older brother, Delano, with him, and Trelawny's already fragile place in the world cracks. He barely gets by, while still trying to impress a father who forever chooses Delano. The stories move chronologically, by years: Delano starting a landscaping business that ultimately fails due to tragedy; Trelawny attending a mostly white college in the Midwest, then living out of his car while working at a retirement community; their cousin trawling lobsters and learning family secrets. The writing and characters are nuanced, with much pain and trauma but also moments of levity and humor. Trelawny is a wonder, constantly trying to improve himself and yet battered again and again by his own actions, or, more likely, those outside his control, like the ever-present Miami hurricanes.

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Starred review from July 1, 2022
A collection of linked stories focused on one family's tempest-tossed journeys in Jamaica and Florida. Escoffery's sharp and inventive debut largely focuses on Trelawny, the bookish son of Jamaican parents whose place in the world is complex both physically (he's homeless for a time) and ethnically. In Jamaica, his light-skinned, mixed-race parents feel superior to those with darker skin; growing up in Miami, he's mistaken as Dominican; in college in the Midwest, he becomes "unquestionably Black." In the finely tuned opening story, "In Flux," Trelawny's efforts to nail down an identity frustrates both himself and others; he's at the center of a question he has a hard time answering and few others want to face. That uncertainty follows him throughout the book as he squabbles with his father and older brother for their esteem. He's also forced to take peculiar and/or degrading jobs to make ends meet: He answers Craigslist ads for a woman who wants a black eye and a couple who want a stereotypically Black man to watch them having sex. Not that the rest of his family has it much better--his older brother, Delano, is a struggling musician working on the side in a shady landscape business, and the much-fought-for family home in Miami is sinking through its foundation. (Delano's thoughts capture the mood of futility: "You try to make a situation better, only to make it worse. Better to do nothing.") But if Escoffery's characters are ambivalent, his writing is clever, commanding, and flexible--he's comfortable in first and second person, standard English and Jamaican patois, Miami ethnic enclaves and white-bread high rises. And he writes thoughtfully about how the exterior forces that have knocked Trelawny's family sideways--Hurricane Andrew, poverty, racism--intersect with and stoke interior fears and bouts of self-loathing. A fine debut that looks at the complexities of cultural identity with humor, savvy, and a rich sense of place.

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Starred review from July 1, 2022

DEBUT This compelling set of interrelated short stories all center on the experiences of a family that moved to Miami from Jamaica during the turbulent 1970s, with Escoffery (winner of the Paris Review's 2020 Plimpton Prize for Fiction) offering unique insight into issues of race and belonging. The main narrator is Trelawny, whose questions about his Jamaican, U.S., and racial identities fuels the bulk of the work. In "Under the Ackee Tree," written from the perspective of Trelawny's domineering father, readers start to understand what made the father the flawed character that he is. Another story, told by older brother Delano, helps shed light on the complicated relationship between the two siblings. This relationship is further explored in the story "If I Survive You," which illustrates the struggle between the brothers over the family home. The most dire story, "Splashdown," features Trelawny's cousin Cukie, who's working to get his life together but becomes a victim of abjectly cruel circumstances. It's heartbreaking. VERDICT A revelatory work, full of a young man's questioning and told in a distinctive voice, this contemplation of identity, culture, and race in the United States today is highly recommended.--Henry Bankhead

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