In a socially distanced world, disconnected from Dustin, I’m left remembering his capacious imagination for human contact. People get into our heads. And when we know they are out there, thinking of us, us thinking of them, that signal is so clear. What Twain told De Quille is true: “human sympathies can stretch.”
It took me a long time to admit any of that. I was, at best, ambivalent about where I come from, but filled with pure hate is more like it. Whenever somebody asked, I always told them I was from Chicago. That’s the way most people do it, right? If you’re from Round Rock, Texas, you’ll say you’re from Austin. If you grew up in Fountain in a house with four bedrooms, a two-car garage, and a big backyard, you just tell people “Colorado,” because they won’t know your hometown. If you’re from Long Island, ran on the cross-country team, and lived in a quiet little subdivision but moved away to college and never looked back, you’ll tell anyone who asks you’re from New York—which isn’t wrong. You just hope they assume you mean Manhattan and not Hicksville, which is over an hour away.
Yet getting to a place where I could clearly and honestly tell people yes, I grew up in suburbia, in neighborhoods up and down Lake Michigan, took a long time. I left as a teenager and immediately started telling people I was from Chicago. I never looked back—until I did.
A pile of little bones, sucked clean of gelatinous tendon and skin, is a sign of a good dim sum brunch had. These leftover knuckles of phoenix claws — more coarsely understood as chicken feet — were deposited on the outskirts of my plate throughout the meals that my family enjoyed about once a month when I was growing up. By the end of our teatime meal, the bones would eventually overtake their small plate.
The new novel is suspenseful and propulsive; in style and theme, a sibling to her previous books. But it’s also a more vulnerable performance, less tightly woven and deliberately plotted, even turning uncharacteristically jagged at points as it explores some of the writer’s touchiest preoccupations.
Written under time pressure and fueled by dismay, outrage, hope, heart, wit, and serious talent, the books span four years, from shortly after Britain's bitterly divisive Brexit vote in 2016 through the day before yesterday. (Actually, Summer concludes with a letter dated July 1, 2020, which was a few weeks after Smith submitted her final draft.) What will keep them fresh long after the news cycle has moved on is their passionate engagement with universal issues such as grief, injustice, human warmth and cruelty, and the life-enhancing powers of love, art, and decency.
“I would always have something to prove,” the narrator of Yaa Gyasi’s new novel says. “Nothing but blazing brilliance would be enough to prove it.”
In such passages of mingled frustration and determination, one senses an element of autobiography.
Tonight, I dressed my son in astronaut pajamas,
kissed his forehead and tucked him in.
I turned on his night-light and looked for you
in the closet and under the bed. I told him