"Never without charm . . . The book's form, like its prose, is ambitious, risky . . . The novel is full of wondrous things—several genial character portraits, funny and exact depictions of West Berlin, [and] beautiful evocations of Chicago . . . Despite the gravity of Jed's burdens and dilemmas (race, success, sanity, America, Germany), the book's tone is comic, pleasingly spry, and the prose breaks naturally into witty one-liners [and] perfected wisdom." —The New Yorker
“Without a hint of sloganeering, Pinckney evokes in these scenes a melancholia that transcends his narrator, achieving something rare in fiction—an honestly-come-by sense of cultural and political sadness. . . . a significant contribution.” —Adam Haslett, The New York Times
"Pinckney writes with profound understanding . . . It's hard to think of a recent novel that so vividly and sensually brings to life a time and place . . . In recent years, Baldwin has come zooming back into American life because we all wish he were here to dress down the racism so rampant in this country. But there’s more to him than being a quotable stick to swing at police videos. In this gorgeous novel, Pinckney demonstrates what that is by carrying the great writer’s project forward." —John Freeman, The Boston Globe
"Vibrant . . . Pinckney improvises and revises the form he’s adopted, avoiding the temptation to lead Jed to easy resolution. In a novel about escaping the confines of home, family, racial narratives, and self-loathing, he argues that accepting those constraints is vital for the narrative of the autobiographical self to emerge. While Pinckney’s prose and formal approach in Black Deutschland point to literary ancestors like W.E.B. Du Bois, James Baldwin, Elizabeth Hardwick, and Christopher Isherwood, the avuncular influence of the Harlem Renaissance writer Claude McKay is perhaps most strongly felt." —Walton Muyumba, The Atlantic
"The distinctive voice narrating Black Deutschland compels an audience to listen . . . A mesmerizing performance." —Brett Josef Grubisic, Lambda Literary
"Black Deutschland not only channels Isherwood, but also suggests Ellison's Invisible Man and Teju Cole's more recent Open City—each one the tale of an outsider whose sharp observations and sometimes sardonic humor are partly made possible because all three are more comfortable watching than participating . . . Each of [Pinckney's] vignettes comes our way through writing that's consistently trenchant and fresh . . . Writing like that makes it easy to keep faith with Black Deutschland and its lonely protagonist, even as he struggles to believe in either the world or himself." —Mike Fischer, The Milwaukee Journal Sentinel
"What's never in doubt is how deeply you're immersed in Jed's impulsive, if occasionally deluded mind . . . For readers up for a fiendishly tricky tour of 20th-century gay, racial and Cold War history and politics, Black Deutschland is a must." —Michael Upchurch, The Seattle Times
"Black Deutschland is a bildungsroman in which all is in flux: identity, sexuality, family, place—even time itself . . . No one is quite who they claim to be, or aim to be. Nor are there any glib resolutions . . . A life and a self are many things—pain and ecstasy, both fleeting, both true." —Dotun Akintoye, O, The Oprah Magazine
"Quietly provocative . . . A rich experience." —Parul Kapur Hinzen, The Rumpus
"Teeming with characters, historical minutiae, and observations on art, Pinckney’s novel is a lively, inviting, and beautifully written story of survival by intellect." —Publishers Weekly (starred review)
"What sustains your attention . . . is Pinckney's dolefully witty and incisively observant voice, whether describing the quirks of his hero's family ('When the going gets rough, make pancakes,' Jed's father advises) or evoking the sights, sounds, and even smells of West Berlin, 'the involuntary island, that petri dish of romantic radicalism.' Pinckney's discursive novel, coming across as if it were a late-20th-century hipster version of Rilke'sThe Notebooks of Marte Laurids Brigge, typifies an era in which inventive, idiosyncratic styles flourish anew in African-American writing." —Kirkus Reviews
“Black Deutschland is beautifully written, the mature work of a major novelist. Darryl Pinckney has crafted a novel that masterfully interrogates ideas of home and away, past and present, and community and isolation, with the clarity, courage, and complexity that only a gifted artist can.” —Henry Louis Gates, Jr.
"This is the book we have been waiting for since we read the Berlin Stories of Christopher Isherwood, although we had no reason to assume it would ever be written. Darryl Pinckney is an unlikely pioneer: a black writer from Indiana who somehow ended up in the divided city of the seventies and eighties and fell in love with it, an alien equipped with Isherwood's curiosity and sharp eye for Berlin's absurdities, but far more open to his own passions and hangups—which allowed him to connect with the unofficial soul of the city in those years. He is a poet gifted with a unique mix of melancholy and anarchic humor. We want him back." —Peter Schneider
“What Christopher Isherwood did for Weimar Berlin, Darryl Pinckney has done, more profoundly, for Berlin behind the wall. This haunted, rebuilt city is the perfect setting for an exploration of the artist as a young, black, gay man, unable to shake off his own troubled past. A beautiful book, witty, sophisticated, and intensely moving.” —Ian Buruma
“Pinckney has magically pulled off space-time travel into the heart of a young gay black American man living in West Berlin just before the Wall comes down. This book gives the intimate feel of that strange era of total freedom; what does a confused, lonely man do when he is finally free? For that matter, what does his wealthy, beautiful cousin (who speaks to him in German) do with her freedom? Here is the whole bohemian world of Berlin, living on the edge of a volcano.” —Edmund White
★ 10/05/2015
Two distinct settings—West Berlin and Chicago—serve as backdrops for this richly imagined second novel by Pinckney (High Cotton). Set in the 1980s, the story spans several years in the life of Jed Goodfinch, a young gay black man with a rehab stint in his past and an Isherwood-nurtured sense of Berlin as a site of intellectual and sexual liberation. “Like most American queers in West Berlin,” he says, “I was in love with Weimar culture.” In his late 20s, Jed, a lover of architecture, flees his native Chicago for Germany to work for N.I. Rosen-Montag, a famous and controversial architect on a “back-to-the-eighteenth-century-scale crusade.” When the gig eventually falls through, Jed sticks around, having a cadre of fellow expatriates, part- and full-time lovers, and family—a second cousin, Cello, who embodies Berlin’s “traditional high culture”—to rely on (or not). Occasional trips back to Chicago, where Jed’s family is deeply involved in black society and politics, telegraph the ugly reality of race in America. In Berlin, Jed is “that person I so admired, the black American expatriate,” but, in the White City, he’s “an embodiment of a social problem, the old slander of what black men were like.” Teeming with characters, historical minutiae, and observations on art, Pinckney’s novel is a lively, inviting, and beautifully written story of survival by intellect. Agent: Rose Cobbe, United Agents. (Feb.)
★ 01/01/2016
In his debut novel, High Cotton, Pinckney created a narrator who resists the reductive racial identity thrust upon him by society and embarks on a journey to define his individualism against and within the historical truth of his family, race, and upbringing. Similar themes run through this novel, as we follow Jed Goodfinch, a recently sober, young, gay black man in search of intellectual and psychological redemption in the fading days of West Germany. Escaping his native Chicago to live with his second cousin, Cello, Jed accepts employment with a renowned architect with an eye toward rebuilding Berlin in prewar stylings. In an attempt to restructure both the city and his own fragmented identity, Jed enters liminal stages of transition from addiction to sobriety and American to expat as Germany undergoes reunification. Meanwhile, his complicated but stable family structure crumbles, forcing Jed to close the physical and emotional distance between his new life in Berlin and his childhood roots in Chicago. VERDICT In a narrative that intersperses humor with literary parables, Pinckney successfully prods at the protected and tightly bounded yet fraught arena of self-actualization and identity. [See Prepub Alert, 8/3/15.]—Joshua Finnell, Los Alamos National Laboratory, NM
2015-10-18
He's black. He's gay. He's a recovering substance abuser. And he's running around Berlin during the 1980s. For the most part, Pinckney's novel succeeds at being as intriguing as its premise. His name is Jed and, like the protagonist of Pinckney's 1992 debut, High Cotton, he's a young, ferociously intelligent product of an accomplished African-American family based in the Midwest; in this case, Chicago, where he finds himself constricted and chafing. Restless for adventure and reinvention, Jed seeks both in West Berlin during the final decade of its walled-off existence. Invoking the name of Christopher Isherwood, he declares at the start that gay sex, even with the advent of AIDS, is what beckons him to Germany. "Berlin," he says, "meant white boys who wanted to atone for Germany's crimes by loving a black boy like me." He spends several summers in Germany, staying with his cousin Cello, an imposing, imperious classical pianist. By the time he decides to stay there for good, Jed has gone into rehab and fights off temptations to reacquaint himself with white wine and designer drugs. At one point in his odyssey, he works as a writer for a celebrated architect whose ambitious proposals to rehabilitate whole sections of Berlin mirror Jed's own attempt to forge a bold new identity. Meanwhile, he seeks out Alcoholics Anonymous meetings with black soldiers; engages with the burgeoning, multicultural nightlife in seedy, neo-bohemian bars; falls in and out of love, sometimes requited, sometimes not. Those looking for a straightforward narrative path toward self-discovery will not find it here. The story shifts back and forth from Chicago to Berlin, from Jed's adolescence to adulthood. What sustains your attention throughout these sometimes-disorienting transitions is Pinckney's dolefully witty and incisively observant voice, whether describing the quirks of his hero's family ("When the going gets rough, make pancakes," Jed's father advises) or evoking the sights, sounds, and even smells of West Berlin, "the involuntary island, that petri dish of romantic radicalism." Pinckney's discursive novel, coming across as if it were a late-20th-century hipster version of Rilke's The Notebooks of Marte Laurids Brigge, typifies an era in which inventive, idiosyncratic styles flourish anew in African-American writing.
