The “lucky” men in Jamel Brinkley’s mighty debut short story collection do not initially appear blessed. Precarious, haunted, wise too long after the event – all seem more apt descriptions as they share their magnetic tales of abandonment and flight, and of wild nights that demand to be followed to their dawn-streaked ends. They aren’t all men, either; for every fedora-doffing dandy and greying has-been there’s a lost boy or an adolescent whose desire feels a lot like fury. Indeed, it’s the question of what it takes to be a man – an American man of colour, specifically – that provides the book’s theme, and though women flit through its pages in various roles, they occupy another realm entirely. The relationships that matter here – those that define Brinkley’s characters, as often as not by their absence – are predominantly paternal and fraternal.
In several stories, race and gender are shown to be largely performative. In the eerie, indelible opener, No More Than a Bubble, two young Columbia dudes profess a liking for curvy women “because that’s what black guys are supposed to like”, and in J’ouvert, 1996, a fatherless boy whose mother has botched his haircut yearns to be in a barbershop, surrounded by “those clever men, grooming each other’s masculinity”. Later on, the protagonist of Infinite Happiness, an archetypal good guy, confesses to always having been “captivated” by men like his flatmate’s lover, a middle-aged charlatan whose talk of African queens and “cerebral vibisms” lets him sleep his way around Brooklyn.
Mr Good Guy turns out to be not all that he seems, and he isn’t the book’s sole unreliable narrator. “The story I’ve just told isn’t the only story; it isn’t the real story that needs to be told,” admits Eric, who’s escaped the Bronx to become an adjunct literature professor and the narrator of Everything the Mouth Eats, in which abuse, brotherhood and the Afro-Brazilian martial art capoeira are deftly interwoven.
Often, the story we start out reading turns out to be a feint, yet none of this tips over into tricksiness. Whether they’re focused on the racism that’s inherent in a certain kind of charity or the complications of dual heritage identity, these are all urgent, intimate narratives, framed as confessions and quests, and edged with quickening threat. Everything that is good can be ruptured with as little as a single accidental touch, “quiet as two lips parting”, and despite his great feeling for beauty and grace, Brinkley is unafraid to probe the ugliest lows of human behaviour.
Throughout, there’s an enigmatic quality to his prose that makes the sharpness of his observations still more dazzling. The truest measure of loneliness, for instance, is the gap between how a person appears to themselves and how they appear to others.
These nine near-faultless stories are laden with similarly pocketable treasures, not only heralding the arrival of a fully formed, entirely distinctive new voice but reinvigorating the short story itself. In the end, there’s no doubt who the lucky ones are: we, the readers.
• A Lucky Man by Jamel Brinkley is published by Serpent’s Tail (£12.99). To order a copy go to guardianbookshop.com or call 0330 333 6846. Free UK p&p over £15, online orders only. Phone orders min p&p of £1.99
