The author, J.M. Holmes ’12
Often, a debut author’s first collection of stories will be an exercise in range, a kind of showing off of all the various modes and styles mastered during their various apprenticeships, one of which is then adopted and expanded for their first novel to follow shortly thereafter. In his debut collection, How Are You Going to Save Yourself, J.M. Holmes ’12 does something far more impressive. The book, although a story collection to be sure, stands in the tradition of works like Sherwood Anderson’s Winesburg, Ohio or Denis Johnson’s Jesus’ Son, in that the stories cohere to impart a fully formed moral and phenomenological universe, focused on a particular place or group, that pierces with an acuity beyond that of the best novels.
The focus in this case is on the lives of four young African-American men in and around Pawtucket, R.I., named Gio, Dub, Rye and Rolls, as they struggle under the legacy of the men who have come before them and the country they have been left with. Over the course of the nine stories, we watch as the four grow from late adolescence into something near to manhood.
The first story, “What’s Wrong with You? What’s Wrong with Me?,” begins with the four young friends smoking weed and posturing (a more accurate term might be “ball busting”), before a sexual revelation leads to bruised egos and bloody fists. In “The Legend of Lonnie Lion,” Gio remembers a disastrous visit to his towering father, who was more skilled as a defensive end in the NFL then he was at raising his son.
As the father walks the son through the airport to fly back to his mother, they pass through a set of totem poles, and Gio waxes: “Faces like legacies carved into trees that had once jutted up into the blue northwest sky, preservations of family histories, legends incarnate. I loved that word.”
In the charged and claustrophobic “Toll for the Passengers,” Dub seizes a lucrative opportunity after an RV full of affluent, mostly white young revelers makes a wrong turn and scratches a car outside his house. And in perhaps the most affecting story, “Everything is Flammable,” Rye attempts to leave his life as a small-time dealer behind for a good job with the fire department. “The city was a tinderbox of old homes, sloping and dry, with old electrical and too many people doing too many things in too many outlets,” Holmes writes. “He knew their accumulated lives were begging for fire.”
As the young men progress, the truth of their lives comes into focus for us and them.
It’s for that reason that many of the pages here will or should discomfit—the attitudes displayed towards women and sex, and the way that those attitudes manifest, can be especially unsettling, even more so for how familiar they may seem. Simply put, there aren’t nearly enough stories being written about people caught in this very particular nexus of race, gender and class, and this book is a brilliant and welcome corrective.
As the young men progress, and the truth of their lives comes into focus for both us and them, we come to understand that we are watching a uniquely American tragedy unfold, a tragedy about the ways in which this society expects or forces its young men to act, young men of color particularly. The title of the book implies a question: Save yourself from what? The answer, we realize, is something like: “Everyone.”
Mancusi’s first novel will be published in 2019 by Hanover Square Press.