Publishers Weekly
★ 02/21/2022
Johnson explores in her brutally funny and poignant debut a Black Latinx woman’s childhood trauma and daily struggles. Vivian is a 30-something state-appointed attorney in a public psychiatric hospital, advocating for the rights of patients. Among the cases she’s working on is Melissa’s, a teenager recently transferred to the adult unit who pulls a knife on hospital staff. Vivian spends her free time smoking weed with her best friend, Jane, in an effort to cope with the painful elements of her life outside work, such as phone calls with her drunk older brother, Michael, who dances around the sexual abuse inflicted upon them as children by their mother’s boyfriends. She also nurses an eating disorder and goes on many fruitless dates in search of the perfect man. Dark humor is another coping mechanism for Vivian, which Johnson deploys with tremendous skill, as Vivian’s only-between-friends joke about Brown University being a “great place to go if you were abused” leads to she and Jane reflecting on their feelings about the younger generation’s embrace of “lefty-politics stuff,” which they wish had been around when they were coming up. After a tense reunion with Michael and their Puerto Rican mother, Vivian starts to unravel as she considers cutting herself off from her family. The pressures build as she botches Melissa’s case, gets dumped, and has a big fight with Jane. Throughout, Vivian’s confrontational interactions feel achingly true to life. This is revelatory and powerful. Agent: Mariah Stovall. Writers House. (Apr.)
From the Publisher
VULTURE, Most Anticipated Books of Spring HARPER’S BAZAAR, Best Books of the Year NYLON, Best Books of April MS. MAGAZINE, Best Books of April DEBUTIFUL, Best Books of April OPRAH DAILY, Best Books of Spring Longlisted for the CENTER FOR FICTION First Novel Prize “Deeply original, socially important, psychologically revelatory, propulsively and idiosyncratically readable. POST-TRAUMATIC is a gem.”—Elif Batuman, author of THE IDIOT
“Chantal V. Johnson has blessed us with a cool, stylish, and violently funny novel about survival. It made me smile, laugh, cringe, shiver, and think. Like life, Post-traumatic is richly triggering and highly recommended.”—Myriam Gurba, author of MEAN
"Stunning and riotous, POST-TRAUMATIC took me right under and then revived me, like only the best fiction can do. Johnson's delicious, meticulous prose delivers such intimacy and hilarity on the page, I laughed and cried all the way through. This is a raw, brilliant, and unforgettable debut. I love everything about it!"—Deesha Philyaw, author of National Book Award Finalist THE SECRET LIVES OF CHURCH LADIES
“Post-traumatic is swift, caustic, charismatic, beautiful, terrifying, and so incredibly funny. It learns and unlearns itself continually, propelled by a restless main character whose gaze withers the world, the reader, and more achingly, herself. Johnson composes such precise, pathologically consumable prose that I couldn't stop reading, even if it was the way I’d watch a scary movie: through my fingers.”—Tommy Pico, author of IRL and JUNK
POST-TRAUMATIC's Vivian is one of the most fascinating characters I've read in contemporary fiction: self-aware and lost, cutting and wounded, resilient and vulnerable — all those misfit bits that add up to the whole of a real human being. And Chantal V. Johnson writes her with a startling intimacy that makes reading feel like an illicit thrill.”—Dawnie Walton, author of THE FINAL REVIVAL OF OPAL & NEV
“Chantal V. Johnson is a brilliant documentarian of the unstable. She writes with a forensic and unsentimental sense of justice, in sentences that spark with life.” —Vanessa Veselka, author of THE GREAT OFFSHORE GROUNDS
“Post-traumatic is astonishingly funny, intimately neurotic, and so honest and necessary that I can't stop thinking about it. From the first sentence, we are thrust into the hyper-awareness of a character whose boundless vigilance makes us feel like both observer and observed. Johnson's attention to detail is so salient that it's simultaneously shocking and familiar. This book is a mirror I couldn't put down.”—Jill Louise Busby, author of UNFOLLOW ME
“With searing intelligence, wicked humor, and an utterly captivating heroine, this brilliant debut shows us what it means to live with, and beyond, trauma. I felt such kinship with Vivian that I sometimes felt like Johnson was reading my mind.”—Jessamine Chan, author of THE SCHOOL FOR GOOD MOTHERS
“This sharp psychological novel tracks the obsessive ruminations of an attorney at a New York City psychiatric hospital named Vivian, who is ‘the only upwardly mobile person’ in her Black Puerto Rican family… As Vivian’s behavior increasingly contradicts her own intellectual convictions, a series of minor disasters prompts her to reconsider her need for control.” —THE NEW YOKRER
“The deep anxieties that permeate Post-traumatic are the other side of the class ascendency that many millennials of color navigate as we square our routinely chaotic lives with memories of go-go ’80s and ’90s years that instilled in us implausible fantasies of ‘the good life.’” —VULTURE, Most Anticipated Books of Spring
"A brutally funny and poignant debut…Dark humor is another coping mechanism for Vivian, which Johnson deploys with tremendous skill…Throughout, Vivian’s confrontational interactions feel achingly true to life. This is revelatory and powerful.”—PUBLISHERS WEEKLY, Starred Review
"Johnson...pulls off a delicate balancing act: She offers up Vivian’s paranoia, her shattered perspective, without calling into question the legitimacy of her pain...Despite the heaviness of the material, Post-Traumatic is highly readable. Johnson’s writing is witty and maximalist, with detailed scene descriptions and hyperverbal, culturally tuned-in dialogue... In writing Vivian, Johnson contends that the stories that fit into a recognizable trauma map may not be peopled by ruined victims and mustache-twirling perps who wander through a perfect moral universe — in which consent presents itself with glimmering transparency and harm never transpires in the gray zone….it is ambiguity that gives Post-Traumatic its power."—Jamie Hood, VULTURE
“Johnson’s debut is a captivatingly raw, funny and relatable take on the survivor narrative.”—Karla J. Strand, MS. Magazine
“Finally, a trauma novel with a sense of humor and levity!”—NYLON
“[A] sardonic, searching novel…Her singular musings—on dieting, dating, and self-medication—entertain and enlighten.”—OPRAH DAILY
“[An] original and darkly hilarious debut.”—DEBUTIFUL
“A captivatingly raw, funny and relatable take on the survivor narrative.”—MS. MAGAZINE
“A seminal work…the Catcher in the Rye of our moment.”—BOOKRIOT podcast
“I stayed up until 7 am reading this book and I feel as though the top of my head has been taken off, in a good way. Post-Traumatic is a wildly perceptive, sharp, often very funny novel about trauma and surviving.”—R. O. Kwon, author of THE INCENDIARIES
“Post-Traumatic has opened up a space for error and ugliness that Black women are seldom afforded in real life, and the book beguiles the reader into loving her in spite of her mess.”—Marina Magloire, THE NATION
"On a craft level, this novel does a lot, subverting expectations and packing a punch. But beyond that, Post-Traumatic says something important about the impact of trauma, our country’s mental health crisis, and the toxic stress faced by a Black Latinx woman in America."—Rachel León, Chicago Review of Books
Library Journal
11/01/2021
A hardworking lawyer for patients with mental health issues at a New York City psychiatric hospital (as her creator once was), Black Latina Vivian survives bad memories from childhood by indulging in reckless dating, edgy humor, and a bit of weed with best friend Jane. A decision after a family reunion to change her life leaves her isolated and clinging to a precipice. This debut from Johnson, a 2018 Center for Fiction Emerging Writers Fellow Johnson, is getting promotional push; with a 30,000-copy first printing.
Kirkus Reviews
2022-02-09
A Black Latina lawyer represents patients at a New York psychiatric hospital while struggling with the aftereffects of her own past trauma.
Johnson’s debut opens with a bang. In the midst of consulting with a new client, Vivian calms a troubled teenager who has just slashed a nurse with a knife. Outwardly she's cool and professional, but once the incident is resolved successfully, Vivian inwardly crumbles, and we soon learn that she's saddled with deep-rooted emotional problems. Haunted by dark memories of childhood sexual abuse, she holds herself together in a state of hypervigilant awareness of possible male violence. A simple subway ride turns into a terrifying adventure in which she’s “besieged by animal fear." Vivian can only relax when she’s smoking weed with her best friend, Jane, who also survived a dysfunctional, abusive family. A dreaded family reunion in which Vivian’s worst fears are realized drives her to a dramatic decision. Will it bring the healing Vivian craves or spiral her further down into a nervous breakdown? While Johnson’s theme—how unresolved personal traumas can cripple a life—is compelling, her execution is marred by clunky prose that makes it difficult to connect with the story (“There was something about shallow clichéd lyrics combined with a sweeping sonic landscape in the sterile setting of a CVS, Duane Reade, or Walgreens that always moved her in a Don DeLillo way”). In trying to capture her protagonist’s anxious and obsessive state of mind, the author often gets bogged down in details that disrupt the narrative flow. An entire paragraph describing calorie counts as diet-obsessed Vivian agonizes over which snacks to purchase doesn’t make for compelling reading. Aside from brutally honest Jane, who calls Vivian out on her self-absorption, the other characters are barely fleshed out. And strangely, the novel hardly delves into the abuse at the core of Vivian’s troubles. Her abuser is simply called “the violent man.”
Buried under excess verbiage, there's a thoughtful novel struggling to come out.
