FAT TIME AND OTHER STORIESby Jeffery Renard Allen
Ralph Ellison took readers to underground places and challenged them to listen to lower frequencies to find a candid and terrifying depiction of Black experiences. In the seven decades since the publication of “Invisible Man“ writers ranging from Toni Morrison and Edward P. Jones to Jesmyn Ward and Colson Whitehead have chosen storytelling with postmodernism, magical realism, and both lyrical and gritty realism to explore and ennoble the ordinary and extraordinary lives of black people past and present .
And then there’s Jeffery Renard Allen, whose writings seem to reach us from the dark side of the moon.
The Chicago-born poet, novelist, short story writer, and once professor of creative writing has developed a small, strange, critically acclaimed body of work over the past quarter century, with two novels, two books of poetry marked by jazz solo plays with language, and a book with short stories. Now he’s adding a new collection of stories to that catalog: “Fat Time and Other Stories.” In Allen’s fashion, the black experience is never subject to conventional parameters of time and space, and his magical realism, far from being performatively exuberant or deliberately provocative, is downright unsettling and unsettling.
The first story in “Fat Time“ “Testimonial (Supported in Belief/Verified in Fact)” begins with people being hunted down by a lynch mob. The narrator saves his son by hiding him in a cow’s anus. The story ends with the same man, now old, meeting his son again, covered in manure and fully grown. The Son’s Apparent Survival – Is He A Ghost? Did he really survive? – is no cause for joy: “What would the others think of his return? Would they be jealous? Those whose sons had not escaped from the coffin of clay? Should I hide my son again? At the end of the story, the son offers harsh comfort to his father by confirming that he is really dead, and so father and ghostly son sat together “the silence of anxious vigil”.
Eerie unrest dominates the stories in this collection. Allen is drawn to situations where poverty and violence, and unstable feelings of self-worth and family and friendship strain already erratic lines of connection, whether it’s between mother and daughter, in “Circle” and “Four Girls,” or between two young men from Chicago. who become erratic, intense lovers, in “Big Ugly Baby.”
The collection also offers confidently eccentric takes on historical figures from the worlds of music and sports, not just to humanize the people behind the iconic profiles – that’s too conventional a move for Allen – but instead to make them simultaneously relatable and new. to make strange.
In “Pinocchio”, Miles Davis detests his adoring white audience and is annoyed at a second cousin who wants to join his band, but getting a new hip made “with metal from a newly discovered planet” is fine. In “Heads,” Jimi Hendrix, who has appeared elsewhere in Allen’s fiction, spends late nights with the painter Francis Bacon, the two talking about making art and life as Jimi occasionally strums his guitar. In the collection’s title story, Allen sends boxer Jack Johnson to Australia for a high-profile fight, where his celebrity and Blackness lead to unique experiences in the racial extremes of local life. Allen also creates a Muhammad Ali who is text-friends with a teenage girl from the moon; in “Orbits”, her family helps Ali prepare for his fight with Larry Holmes in 1980, while the champion helps her with dilemmas at birthday parties.
From the description alone, you might think this is just a weird and wise comedy, but I think Allen has more in common with Donald Glover than George Saunders. Like the last season of Glover’s ‘Atlanta” “Fat Time and Other Stories” doesn’t pretend to entertain, or actually care much about what his audience will think of the odd twists it pursues, or that not all of those twists necessarily work. These are difficult, inventive stories that, at their best, take on a range of frequencies and otherworldly places with – to borrow Allen’s brilliant three-word description of Jimi Hendrix’s way with music – a “fierce itchy glare.”
Randy Boyagoda is a professor of English at the University of Toronto. His latest book is ‘Dante’s Indiana’.
FAT TIME AND OTHER STORIES | By Jeffery Renard Allen | 268 pp. | Graywolf Press | Paperback, $16
