Loving Day: A Novel
A satirical novel about a biracial man who returns to Philadelphia, confronts family secrets and ghosts, and tries to remake his life.
Book Information
- Publisher
- Spiegel & Grau
- Published
- 2015-05-26
- Pages
- 304 pages
- Language
- 英語
- Size
- 16.15 x 2.57 x 24.16 cm
- ISBN-13
- 9780812993455
- ISBN-10
- 0812993454
- Price
- 11292 JPY
- Category
- 洋書/Literature & Fiction/Genre Fiction/Urban Life
A NEW YORK TIMES NOTABLE BOOK | NAMED ONE OF THE TEN BEST BOOKS OF THE YEAR BY MIAMI HERALD AND ONE OF THE BEST BOOKS OF THE YEAR BY San Francisco Chronicle • NPR • Men’s Journal • The Denver Post • Slate • The Kansas City Star • Time Out New York | From the author of the critically beloved Pym (“Imagine Kurt Vonnegut having a beer with Ralph Ellison and Jules Verne.”— Vanity Fair ) comes a ruthlessly comic and moving tale of a man discovering a lost daughter, confronting an elusive ghost, and stumbling onto the possibility of utopia. “In the ghetto there is a mansion, and it is my father’s house.” Warren Duffy has returned to America for all the worst reasons: His marriage to a beautiful Welsh woman has come apart; his comics shop in Cardiff has failed; and his Irish American father has died, bequeathing to Warren his last possession, a roofless, half-renovated mansion in the heart of black Philadelphia. On his first night in his new home, Warren spies two figures outside in the grass. When he screws up the nerve to confront them, they disappear. The next day he encounters ghosts of a different kind: In the face of a teenage girl he meets at a comics convention he sees the mingled features of his white father and his black mother, both now dead. The girl, Tal, is his daughter, and she’s been raised to think she’s white. Spinning from these revelations, Warren sets off to remake his life with a reluctant daughter he’s never known, in a haunted house with a history he knows too well. In their search for a new life, he and Tal struggle with ghosts, fall in with a utopian mixed-race cult, and ignite a riot on Loving Day, the unsung holiday for interracial lovers. A frequently hilarious, surprisingly moving story about blacks and whites, fathers and daughters, the living and the dead, Loving Day celebrates the wonders of opposites bound in love. Praise for Loving Day “Incisive . . . razor-sharp . . . that rare mélange: cerebral comedy with pathos. The vitality of our narrator deserves much of the credit for that. He has the neurotic bawdiness of Philip Roth’s Alexander Portnoy; the keen, caustic eye of Bob Jones in Chester Himes’s If He Hollers Let Him Go; the existential insight of Ellison’s Invisible Man.” — The New York Times Book Review “Exceptional . . . To say that Loving Day is a book about race is like saying Moby-Dick is a book about whales. . . . [Mat Johnson’s] unrelenting examination of blackness, whiteness and everything in between is handled with ruthless candor and riotous humor. . . . Even when the novel’s family strife and racial politics are at peak intensity, Johnson’s comic timing is impeccable.” — Los Angeles Times “Johnson, at his best, is a powerful comic observer [and] a gifted writer, always worth reading on the topics of race and privilege.’” —Dwight Garner, The New York Times “Hilarious and touching new novel about family, identity and what it means to truly love other people . . . The disasters make us who we are, and the results can sometimes be amazing—as amazing as this beautiful, triumphant miracle of a book.” —NPR “Giddy, biting . . . ferocious . . . Grand metaphors, unsparing social commentary, sharp characters, and sharper humor help propel the book. . . . A welcome effort from a major talent.” — The Boston Globe
Mat Johnson is the author of the novels Pym, Drop, and Hunting in Harlem, the nonfiction novella The Great Negro Plot, and the comic books Incognegro and Dark Rain . He is a recipient of the United States Artist James Baldwin Fellowship, the Hurston/Wright Legacy Award, and the John Dos Passos Prize for Literature. He is a faculty member at the University of Houston Creative Writing Program.
Reviews
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Four Stars
Quite original and endearing.
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You'll Love Loving Day
As part of my Houston-centric reading list I read Loving Day by Mat Johnson a professor in the fantastic Creative Writing program at the University of Houston in Texas. Mr. Johnson is bi-racial - pink and darker colors - and writes about that poignantly and powerfully through the character of the Father and Daughter in Loving Day. Throw in religious differences too, an education commune, graphic novels, romance and the cult of personality and this makes for one interesting novel. Mr. Johnson has a perspective few people have - or maybe one different from my world - that he conveys convincingly and entertainingly. I look forward to reading more of his works.
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Biracial Gothic
A fascinating exploration of race in America; sometimes a bit heavy handed but with real humanity and heart. Definitely unlike anything else I have read
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Brilliant tongue-in-cheek take on black, white and shades of beige
This is a very amusing, irreverent and often deeply poignant look at the meaning of colour and whether “one drop”of black makes a “white” person black and vice versa, as well as the confusion around identity when origins or ancestry is a melting pot. The human thread drawn through the story keeps it alive and adds the depth needed to prevent it from being completely farcical. I thoroughly enjoyed it and loved its cheekiness.
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I enjoyed the book immensely
An amusing romp through the madness of mixed racial identity, unexpected parenthood, and degrees of blackness in the modern world of mixed race America where most of us are of mixed parentage--and the further back we go in time, the more mixed up it becomes. Imagine, then, a school to teach us who we are and how to identify with roots we may not have known we had. While The title derives from the Supreme Court "Loving" Decision that threw out miscegenation laws in 16 States and made interracial marriage "legal" in America. I enjoyed the book immensely, I was left at the end wanting more, so I'm looking forward to Mat Johnson's next book.