Susan (a shrink with a lot of time on her hands) says to Tom, "Will you stay in New York and tell me all you know?" and he does, for nearly 600 mostly-bloated pages of flashbacks depicting The Family Wingo of swampy Colleton County: a beautiful mother, a brutal shrimper father (the Great Santini alive and kicking), and Tom and Savannah's much-admired older brother, Luke.
Savannah, it turns out, is catatonic, and before the suicide attempt had completely assumed the identity of a dead friend-the implication being that she couldn't stand being a Wingo anymore. When he hears that his fierce, beautiful twin sister Savannah, a well-known New York poet, has once again attempted suicide, he escapes his present emasculation by flying north to meet Savannah's comely psychiatrist, Susan Lowenstein. Tom Wingo is an unemployed South Carolinian football coach whose internist wife is having an affair with a pompous cardiac man. Even so, the novel ends on a note of hope.Ī flabby, fervid melodrama of a high-strung Southern family from Conroy ( The Great Santini, The Lords of Discipline), whose penchant for overwriting once again obscures a genuine talent. And Osita-who loved Vivek and knew him better than anyone-cannot say everything he knows. There’s something heartbreaking about the fact that his story can only be told by others, especially since some of them never saw him as he wanted to be seen. Only a handful of chapters-most of them very brief-are told from Vivek’s point of view. He is only just beginning to express his true self openly when he dies. When Vivek lets his hair grow long and acknowledges his true sexuality, he experiences some relief from this stress, but new problems arise-including an aunt who thinks he’s possessed by demons and boys who throw bottles at him. Eventually, Vivek will explain that these were moments when the burden of living an inauthentic life became too much to bear.
The first hint of trouble ahead is when Vivek starts slipping into fugue states. In these early chapters, there is no sense of the tragedy that’s coming.
As the narrative moves around in time and from viewpoint to viewpoint, Emezi offers a richly textured depiction of a middle-class community in Nigeria-one that includes several immigrants, among them Vivek’s Indian mother. The next chapter is told from the perspective of Vivek’s cousin, Osita. Nor does the first chapter, which is one sentence long: “They burned down the market on the day Vivek Oji died.” Then the story moves into the past to introduce Vivek’s father, Chika, as he is about to meet Kavita, the woman who will become his wife and Vivek’s mother. This book’s title leaves no doubt about the fate of its central character. The author of the young adult novel Pet, a finalist for the 2019 National Book Award, offers another exploration of gender identity, this time for adults.
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