{"id":41329,"date":"2015-06-08T01:18:27","date_gmt":"2015-06-08T01:18:27","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.mixedracestudies.org\/?p=41329"},"modified":"2015-06-08T01:18:27","modified_gmt":"2015-06-08T01:18:27","slug":"loving-day-by-mat-johnson","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/?p=41329","title":{"rendered":"\u2018Loving Day,\u2019 by Mat Johnson"},"content":{"rendered":"

\u2018Loving Day,\u2019 by Mat Johnson<\/a><\/strong><\/em><\/p>\n

Sunday Book Review<\/a>
\nThe New York Times<\/a>
\n2015-06-01<\/p>\n

Baz Dreisinger<\/a><\/strong>, Associate Professor of English
\nJohn Jay College of Criminal Justice, City University of New York<\/em><\/p>\n

\u201cA house divided against itself cannot stand,\u201d Abraham Lincoln declared in his 1858 speech presaging the Civil War<\/a>. Such a house sits at the heart of Mat Johnson\u2019s<\/a> ribald, incisive novel \u201cLoving Day<\/a>.\u201d Bequeathed to the narrator, Warren Duffy, by his deceased father, it\u2019s a roofless, ramshackle mansion in a black neighborhood in Philadelphia<\/a>: \u201cI look at the buckling floors. I look at the cracks in all the walls, the evidence of a foundation crumbling beneath us. I smell the char of the fire, the sweet reek of mold, the insult of mouse urine. I see a million things that have to be fixed, restored, corrected, each one impossible and each task mandatory for me to escape again.\u201d<\/p>\n

The house is haunted. There are ghosts, mostly of neighborhood crackheads<\/a> \u2014 that is, if we take Warren\u2019s word for it; our narrator\u2019s psyche is as wrecked as his inheritance. An \u201cinept\u201d comic book artist \u2014 \u201cMy work is too realistic, too sober\u201d \u2014 he has moved back to America from Wales<\/a> after a failed business and broken marriage. He\u2019s wrecked, too, by his liminal \u00adracial status: His father was an Irishman, his mother was black and he comfortably claims neither \u2014 call him a man divided against himself. \u201cI am a racial optical illusion,\u201d he says.<\/p>\n

Warren lives and breathes what W.\u2009E.\u2009B. Du\u202fBois<\/a> called double consciousness<\/a>, by which the American black person is \u201calways looking at one\u2019s self through the eyes of others. .\u2008.\u2008. One ever feels his two-ness, \u2014 an American, a Negro; two souls, two thoughts, two unreconciled strivings; two warring ideals in one dark body.\u201d Except Warren\u2019s body is white, making things even thornier; he\u2019s perpetually performing a black identity that isn\u2019t written all over his face \u2014 as when he describes \u201cletting my black voice come out, to compensate for my ambiguous appearance. Let the bass take over my tongue. Let the South of Mom\u2019s ancestry inform the rhythm of my words in a way few white men could pull off.\u201d…<\/p>\n

Read the entire review here<\/a>.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

\u2018Loving Day,\u2019 by Mat Johnson Sunday Book Review The New York Times 2015-06-01 Baz Dreisinger, Associate Professor of English John Jay College of Criminal Justice, City University of New York \u201cA house divided against itself cannot stand,\u201d Abraham Lincoln declared in his 1858 speech presaging the Civil War. Such a house sits at the heart […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[12,5,8,20],"tags":[2710,2355,2640,2327],"class_list":["post-41329","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-articles","category-book-reviews","category-media-archive","category-usa","tag-baz-dreisinger","tag-mat-johnson","tag-new-york-times","tag-the-new-york-times"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/41329","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=41329"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/41329\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=41329"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=41329"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=41329"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}