05/30/2022
The inventive if messy latest from Okparanta (Under the Udala Trees) chronicles the coming-of-age of a young white man who is convinced he is Black. In 2016, 14-year-old Harry Sylvester Bird develops an enduring fascination with Blackness while on a safari in Tanzania. (Regarding a Black tour guide’s arm hairs: “I noted them and wished I could be them.”) Several years later and back home in Edward, Pa., Harry’s racist parents slide toward financial catastrophe as Harry graduates high school and Covid-19 takes hold, spurring vaccination checkpoints and a national “bubble registry.” Eager to distance himself from his family, Harry moves to New York and starts to identify as Black, going by “G-Dawg” and joining a “Transracial-Anon” support group. After ambivalently accepting a scholarship from the Purists (an extremist white populist political party), Harry enrolls in college and falls in love with Maryam, a fellow student from Nigeria. Despite some disastrous early dates, the couple stays together for years until a study-abroad trip to Ghana compels Harry to grapple with his identity and puts his relationship with Maryam to the test. There are weighty ideas here, but Harry’s lack of self-awareness will test readers’ patience, and the satire sometimes gets lost in the scattered plot. This doesn’t quite stick the landing. (July)
In this oddly affecting novel…Okparanta has laid bare some of our most vexing issues on race and identity, most notably those involving extremism and intolerance. Her unorthodox approach invites us—at our own risk—on an offbeat journey at once rattling and revealing.” — Minneapolis Star Tribune
“Irreverent and compassionate at once, Okparanta interrogates our current moment. In her hands, humor is a weapon, a tool, and a salve. You will laugh until you cry, or maybe you will cry until you laugh.” — Tayari Jones, author of An American Marriage and Silver Sparrow
“In her long-anticipated sophomore novel Harry Sylvester Bird, Chinelo Okparanta deftly slips into a new skin to deliver a scathing and incisive look at white America. A must-read for everyone committed to the work of anti-racism, Harry Sylvester Bird is both a delightfully unsettling and deeply necessary political text; a timely triumph of satire by one of our finest literary minds.” — Akwaeke Emezi, author of The Death of Vivek Oji
“Bleak and biting, but often disarmingly funny.” — New York Times
“Arresting, bold, and exactly the kind of book we need right now. Harry Sylvester Bird is haunting in the best way possible. It is truly thrilling to read such an unapologetic point of view from such a masterful storyteller.” — Angie Cruz, author of Dominicana
“Chinelo Okparanta is one of our finest writers, and Harry Sylvester Bird is her finest book yet: funny, moving, and (in the best sense of the word) incendiary.” — David Leavitt, author of Shelter in Place
“Chinelo Okparanta has written a biting, deftly written satire that throws into sharp relief contemporary politics around identity, race, and nationalism. Harry Sylvester Bird is an enigmatic narrator whose fumbling efforts at self-actualization and romance remind us of the universal struggle to know oneself and to be more than the prejudices we’ve inherited.” — Naomi Jackson, author of The Star Side of Bird Hill
“Chinelo Okparanta’s new book has its finger firmly on the American zeitgeist. It is provocative in its look at race today, it is thoughtful, but most of all it is beautifully written.” — Helon Habila, author of Travelers and Oil on Water
"Ambitious and daring." — Booklist
"Incisive and innovative. . .Harry Sylvester Bird is a bildungsroman for our time: a coming-of-race novel.... [and] raises questions about whiteness, identity and its limits, and the psychology, politics, and culture of race. [The novel] utilizes a potent mix of satire and horror to produce the creeping uneasiness that infuses so much of the American psyche right now. Okparanta is also exploring a (or perhaps the) tension at the center of American Literature." — Washington Independent Review of Books
"A tart questioning exploration of how deep racism runs." — Kirkus Reviews
"Inventive." — Publishers Weekly
Chinelo Okparanta is one of our finest writers, and Harry Sylvester Bird is her finest book yet: funny, moving, and (in the best sense of the word) incendiary.
In her long-anticipated sophomore novel Harry Sylvester Bird, Chinelo Okparanta deftly slips into a new skin to deliver a scathing and incisive look at white America. A must-read for everyone committed to the work of anti-racism, Harry Sylvester Bird is both a delightfully unsettling and deeply necessary political text; a timely triumph of satire by one of our finest literary minds.
Irreverent and compassionate at once, Okparanta interrogates our current moment. In her hands, humor is a weapon, a tool, and a salve. You will laugh until you cry, or maybe you will cry until you laugh.
Arresting, bold, and exactly the kind of book we need right now. Harry Sylvester Bird is haunting in the best way possible. It is truly thrilling to read such an unapologetic point of view from such a masterful storyteller.
Chinelo Okparanta’s new book has its finger firmly on the American zeitgeist. It is provocative in its look at race today, it is thoughtful, but most of all it is beautifully written.
Chinelo Okparanta has written a biting, deftly written satire that throws into sharp relief contemporary politics around identity, race, and nationalism. Harry Sylvester Bird is an enigmatic narrator whose fumbling efforts at self-actualization and romance remind us of the universal struggle to know oneself and to be more than the prejudices we’ve inherited.
2022-04-27
A teenager conducts a yearslong effort to shake off his White privilege in Africa, suburbia, and New York.
We meet the title character of Okparanta’s second novel, after Under the Udala Trees (2015), in 2016 in Tanzania, on a safari with his parents, who exemplify ugly (White) Americanism. If Wayne and Chevy aren’t bickering with each other, they’re making casually racist comments and treating the Black tour guides contemptuously. Harry’s embarrassment at their behavior, combined with a connection with one guide, moves the 14-year-old to resent “the prominent paleness of my skin.” Back home in the Pennsylvania suburbs, the rift widens as Wayne, a mediocre teacher, loses his job and pursues ill-advised schemes like attempting to sell 3-D printed guns, while Harry plans his escape. Though Harry detests his parents and makes various anti-racist gestures, he decides to take a scholarship from a group of God-and-flag Whites called Purists (read: Trumpists) to escape his parents and go to college in Manhattan. Okparanta’s satire of White racism and hypocrisy is sometimes cartoonish, especially when it comes to Wayne, but it’s sharp in the latter sections, as when Harry attends meetings of “Transracial-Anon,” a 12-step group that’s less anti-racist and more pro–self-pity, or uses an app called Dignity that effectively removes the burden of how to treat people or when a public act of goodwill by Harry’s Black girlfriend becomes warped by bigots. Harry’s dream of “racial reassignment” is a fool’s errand, of course, but Okparanta suggests that even more modest gestures of allyship don’t meaningfully address racist instincts. The novel comes full circle with a trip to Ghana’s Gold Coast, the one-time center for the slave trade, suggesting that while Harry isn’t exactly his father’s son, he’s inherited a cultural affliction that he can’t shake off.
A tart, questioning exploration of how deep racism runs.