minor black figures

my next novel

Hello friends—

First, I would like to point out that the Trump administration has declared its intention to arrest and deport activists and political dissidents, including student protestors and legal residents of this country. This is a terrifying stroke against civil liberties.

It also represents an attempt to characterize as anti-semitic the protests against Israel’s ongoing program of genocidal violence against the Palestinians. This is already having a chilling effect (perhaps the desired effect) in the halls of power at elite university. Recently Columbia’s Journalism School faculty urged its non-citizen students to forgo posts and protests for the cause of Palestinian liberation. “Nobody can protect you,” Jelani Cobb, Dean of the J School, told a group of students when asked what the University was doing in the face of arrest and detention by the Department of Homeland security.

This week, Columbia moved forward with expulsions, long-term suspensions, and degree revocations of 22 students involved in organizing and participating in the Pro-Palestine protests of last year.

Columbia University graduate student Mahmoud Khalil was detained by ICE agents in grad student housing, shipped far from home, and declared an enemy of America by the President of the United States. He is being detained and processed for revocation of his Green Card and deportation. He has a family. A wife and a child due any week now. The President declared Khalil’s arrest the first of many.

These are scary times. Urgent times. I hope you will consider giving to Khalil’s support fund. And that you will join the many thousands demanding his release.

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Second order of business.

My next book is called Minor Black Figures, and it comes out October 7. I hope you will consider pre-ordering it.

Minor Black Figures is a novel about what happens when you spend all of a New York summer having sex with a hot Jesuit.

I suppose it’s about other stuff too. The novel follows Wyeth, a painter living in New York, as he grapples with what it means to be a painter in an era of hyper-mediation, and what it means to be a Black painter in an era of identitarian grift and the commercialization of identity. I wanted to write about a painter coming to terms with his own political expression when the very fact of political expression can sometimes feel like a pose or a gesture. It’s a book about painting and cinema and the gaze. It’s about COVID. It’s about New York. It’s about the fall of Roe. It’s about protest. It’s about silliness. It’s about a certain kind of spiritual crisis of the aging millennial in the face of History’s totality, trying to find a name for that crisis. It’s a book about all that stuff and also about nothing. To me, it’s a love story.

As for the jacket, I like it. A book comes by its cover in many different ways, largely depending on the culture and procedure of the house publishing it. I do not know how my book came by this cover. I do not know how many rounds my editor and the other people at the house went through before they showed me this one and the other option right before it. I don’t know when the process began. I know nothing. This is not unusual, I am told. What I do know is that there was first cover I was shown. I gave feedback. And then they came back with this one.

I think it suits the book in tone and spirit. I think it also rewards deeper knowledge of the novel, so it will continue grow as you read. I think that’s a great thing for a book cover. To reveal new resonances between itself and the novel it is meant to convey as the reader becomes more familiar with the novel. My first thought when I saw it was, “Oh yeah, if I saw that in a bookstore, I would lament not having it for myself.” That to me is the sign of a good cover.

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I’d like to tell you a bit about how I came to write Minor Black Figures.

In July 2023, I booked a room in the aparthotel Citadines, near Les Halles in Paris. I had just finished teaching during the summer residency of NYU’s Low-Residency MFA program, where I am on faculty. I had spent May and June in various cities in America, Canada, and the United Kingdom promoting my novel The Late Americans, which had just come out. I was in a low mood because I was stuck on the novel I was meant to be writing next, a novel called Group Show, about a group of museum assistants in a small regional museum in Madison, Wisconsin.

Just before boarding the eight-hour flight from JFK to CDG, I had emailed a partial manuscript of Group Show to my editor and asked him to tell me if the writing was any good. I had been trying and failing to get the novel off the ground since 2018, each time writing about 137 pages only to throw them out and begin again, over and over. I even got a fellowship to work on the novel, and at the conclusion of that fellowship, I went on tour to promote The Late Americans and to feel despair over not being able to bring off Group Show.

The particular crisis I was having over Group Show was that I did not know how to write the kind of novel I increasingly wanted to write. In my drafts, everything felt so tidy, so squared away. Every opening felt so sleekly cinematic. Cold open. Sharp phrasing. In the immediate drama of the characters’ lives. But the kind of book I wanted to write was broader than that, something evoking the time. Evoking the precise and particular historical moment that my characters were living in and creating. I wanted also to chronicle some of how that moment had come about. I reread A Tale of Two Cities and Anna Karenina. I wanted to write a big book, but in a way that made sense for me.

What I was encountering time and again in my drafts was the realization that my gifts as a writer run to dramatic enactment and the drama of the soul. I am not a social novelist, not really. I like writing books about people, specific people at specific moments in their lives, and I like drawing out all of the complicated nuances and tensions that make them who they are. I am a psychological portraitist. That is what I learned over five or so years of successive drafting and re-drafting, arriving in fitful, sweating bursts to the idea that I just didn’t know how to get what I wanted from what I am good at.

Before I fully accepted that however, I thought maybe the writing was bad, and that maybe my inability to get beyond 137 pages was simply because the prose wasn’t good or the story wasn’t good. During my tour for The Late Americans, I went back to Madison, Wisconsin. I visited many of the places I love most in that city, and saw some of the people who have meant the most to me in my life. As I walked and ate and took in the wide sky, the strange quiet of the streets so unlike New York, the sheen on the lake, and the deep green of the trees, it occurred to me that I could write Group Show, but in order to do so, I would need to move back to Wisconsin for the year or so it would take to write it. I would need to immerse myself richly, deeply back in the rhythms of life there, and to trace those rhythms down to their very origin.

What I realized as I crossed the summit at the top of State Street was that I didn’t want to write a cursory novel about the place, and that for the book to rise above mere style and fashion, putting a sneering Millennial gloss on a situation that might have unfolded in any number of mid-sized cities across America, I would need to live there and to give myself to the place. In effect, I realized that I had come out of phase with the book. I knew too much at that moment about what a good book needed and I couldn’t go on doing half a job. And also, that the book I felt most primed to write right then was not the book about a mid-sized art museum in the Midwest.

Still, I turned painfully from that knowledge and I wrote another 137 pages over the course of my book tour, drawing new images and ideas from my brief trip back to Madison. In July, just before I got on the flight, I emailed the pages to my editor.

By the time I got through baggage claim in Paris, he had emailed me back to say that the writing was very good, that the story was very good, and that he believed in the book. I found this clarifying, standing there with my bags teetering. Clarifying because I knew immediately that I would not write Group Show. I told him that I would write a different book and I would send it to him when it was done. I planned to start at the end of the residency.

By the time the residency ended and I checked into Citadines, my editor had been fired in a storm of layoffs at Penguin Random House. I was, after three books, orphaned, without an idea for a new book, but desperately in need of one.

In that room in Citadines Les Halles, I spent the first couple of days not really writing but acquiring things to make a nest of sorts. I had acquired a tower fan, a Brita carafe, several 12oz (American-sized, I said to myself) paper cups, and I learned a lot about French lightbulbs because the lighting in Citadines Les Halles is atrocious. I bought a floor lamp. I bought too many notebooks. I bought pencils and a pencil sharpener. It rained a lot those first couple days. Not a lot actually. I mean it rained often, but it was a soft rain, pelting the green leaves.

After those two days, I woke up with a painful sore on my right thigh, way up inside, near my scrotum. As the day went on, I could feel the sore growing more sublimely sensitive as I did my little errands. I did a telemedicine visit with a doctor from Hungary because I needed a refill of my antidepressants. Then I walked, limped really, over to one of those green-cross pharmacies on the square. By the time I made it back to my room, I was wincing with every step. I could feel my pulse inside of the sore in my thigh. It hurt so bad, and my leg was hot, feverish. I waited for the long Paris evening to end, and I crushed up Benadryl to sleep. The next day, the sore was worse, and I was afraid of getting a skin infection or that I already had one. So I went back to the pharmacy and explained to the pharmacist the issue. She gave me an antiseptic and some gauze. This worked well though it stung so bad I thought I’d lose my mind. There was a lot of blood the next day. And the next. The sore had opened, brought to a head by the antiseptic. Each morning, I woke up and pressed a cloth to the wound to clean it. I felt like a Zola character in squalor and agony.

I was reading a lot of Zola at the time because it was the end of that two-year period in which I read the Rougon-Macquart, but I was not yet done and would not be done for many more months. I think possibly all of the Zola is one of the things that deformed my sense of the novel. Or I should say, reading all of the Zola invited me to…expand my idea of what the novel could do and should do. I used to have a very narrow sense of what a novel should or could contain. But then I read Zola, and had to contend with the smallness I felt and still feel when I think about my novels and my stories. Why was I so afraid of historical specificity? Why did I think that denuding my fiction of particulars of politics, history, and setting would make it more…legible? Universal? I don’t know. But Zola gave the lie to that. And I found it hard to look at my writing in the same way after I read all of those books.

That summer, I was reading Nana, my least favorite of the Zola novels. Some will say this is controversial. I don’t care. It’s boring. It took me months to get through that book. It haunted me. Dogged me all through my stay. I read Nana, feverish and oozing. Then the sore was better. And I could walk with no pain. I had an appetite again. I had avoided sepsis. I wasn’t going to die. But I still had to write my novel.

The first line I wrote of the novel was, “That summer, the painting was not going well.”

My last novel, The Late Americans was a multi-POV book chronicling a year or so in the lives of a group of people living in Iowa City. People think that book is about an MFA program, but only one of the characters is a poet, and he isn’t even the main narrator of the book. Still, I had written a book with lots of POVs in it, and I wanted to return in a sense to a fairly controlled novel. I wanted to write one character over a very constrained period of time. I think that is where I am at my best. But I also wanted to write a book that could contain a democratic potential, by which I mean, a book that could, at the very level of form and style, dissolve protagonisticity. If only for a moment. At the time, I was reading a lot of Jameson and a lot of Lukács, perhaps too much of both. Still, I wanted to write a book that was focused, but in its focus could contain something vast.

I knew that I wanted to write about a painter. I wanted to write about being a black artist. I wanted to write about why so much contemporary painting is so ugly. I wanted to write about certain lazy habits of mind when it comes to writing about or thinking about black art. I wanted to write about the kinds of questions you are plagued by if you are a vaguely self-aware black artist in America right now. All of the various systems you’ve got to be aware of but also ignore but also play to but also be assumed to be playing to. I suppose I wanted to capture the end-product of that hermeneutics of suspicion, what happens to the black artist who is endlessly and from all asides accused of making art for reasons that have nothing to do with why they’re actually making art.

I also wanted to write about art restoration and research. I did not want to write one of those books—increasingly popular—about fictional or real (or both?) artist or thinker or figure and the spectral authorial presence who goes hunting for them in the archive. The last thing I wanted to do was write a book about a black painter in contemporary New York that gets spliced with fucking journal entries or, god for bid, that evil construct, the braided timeline. I would rather die. I would rather have my hands broken over a rock and be cast into the sea than write a book like that. No shade to anyone who has or will engage in the dark arts of metafiction and critical fabulation. Love that for you. But that’s not how I plan to live my life.

But I did want to write a book sensitive to the existence of archives. Suffused with the presence of actual figures and people. Historically situated, some might say. But also, playful. Open. I had fun writing all of the paperwork in the book. And the work with paper. I spent a lot of time reading about lithography and paper conservation. And also learning about arts admin in the mid-century. For reasons that will become…clear to you, hopefully, if you read the book.

Also I just wanted to write about a black painter my age in New York. What kind of stuff does he get up to? What happens if he makes out with a priest one muggy July evening? Start from there. So I did.

I stayed in the hotel for almost two weeks, going out for meals or to take walks. The light in summer is, well, you do not need me to tell you about the light in Paris, but it was wonderful, especially in the evening. Purple shadows coming across the tops of dark trees and the somber buildings, everything lower to the ground, affording so much more sky. At the end of the two weeks, I had about a hundred pages. I had a solid start on the book.

For most of the fall, I worked on the novel, determined as I was to put it to bed before the end of the year. The only breaks I took from the book were to teach or to write the long Zola article I was very behind on. By December, I had a draft.

I started out calling the book Masstone, but I think that looks stupid on a cover. So for a time, the book had no title. But by the time I turned it in to my editor, I believe I was already calling it Minor Black Figures. I think the title suits it better, and it wasn’t until I realized that it was the title that something clicked into place for me about the deep spiritual concerns of the book.

Publishing a book is in some aspects a brutal lesson in letting go and accepting the harrowing premise of being misread. Or perhaps it is a celebrating in the existence of other minds, I don’t know. I change my opinion on it daily. But what I will say is that for me, I wrote this book—at first unconsciously and then consciously—as a way of making sense of what to me feels like one of the great aesthetic and spiritual issue of our time: a crisis of mediation. In a moment when everything and everyone is trying to persuade how to be, how to live, how to make meaning, when every work of art is shredded and pulped to be made into a paste of affirmation existential and otherwise, what room is there for the primacy of our own human selves. I wanted to write a book about what happens when you are compromised at a deep spiritual level by the surveillance of the state, surveillance of society, surveillance of yourself. How does that inform how you move and live and love and care and reject and fight, etc.

Formally, aesthetically, I wanted to write a book that felt like a book. Sometimes, the feedback from my agent and my editor ran counter to this goal. And I started to understand, oh, yeah, we’re all really compromised right now, aesthetically, by the existence of the Netflix mini-series. Other times, they were right about pacing or other things.

Minor Black Figures is the book I have written out of all of my concerns and thoughts and self-abuse and agony over the last few years, and years before that. I feel in some ways, I had to break with the writer I was in order to write it, or maybe I became the writer I wanted to be in order to write it. I find it a strange and mysterious book. There are whole sections of it that I have no recollection of writing. And then there are other passages which bring back the quality of light in the trees outside my window as I wrote. I don’t know what this book portends for me. If it portends anything. I know that when I look it, I will always think about the strangeness of those two weeks in Citadines Les Halles. The blood in the towels. The stinging mist of pollen in the air. The birds cooing in the trees over my balcony. The African gospel singers down on the square, singing and handing out Baptist leaflets. The sound of the Pro-Ukraine protest in front of the Five Guys next to the bookshop combination record store. Though so many of the pages I wrote during that time have been moved and edited, remade and reimagined, they still contain, for me, so much of the impressions that made them.

As I was writing this post and going through pictures from that time, I remembered something crazy. At the end of the trip, I went to the airport in order to go home. I was ready to be back in my own apartment. This will sound nuts, but I swear it happened. We were all lined up at the gate when they come on the intercom and say that there will be a delay because of something involving the plane. It eventually came out that the plane we were meant to take had been struck by lightning as it descended to CDG. It could not cleared for take-off again. It also turned out that AirFrance did not have another plane for us to take. They looked for a couple hours and it just wouldn’t work, so they had us follow them through the airport.

I knew where this was going, but some of the people did not. We followed a small man with sharp, swift strides as he led us like a mother duck through the winding paths and out to the service desk. Where we were told we would not be able to leave because there were no other flights. There were meltdowns. There was madness and bedlam.

The gate agent booked me not in the class I previously had booked and when I asked if there was a way to make it right, she said, “Honestly, just be grateful you have a seat. Some of these people are going to be stuck here for days.”

It now occurs to me that this was during the madness regarding computer systems going down. It was a travel apocalypse. There had already been many cancellations. So I booked myself into a hotel. This is when I tell you, again, that this really happened.

Because when I got to the hotel, I went upstairs, but my keycard didn’t work. So I went back downstairs, and they said, no, it should work. So they went me upstairs with a young man to make sure. And it turned out that I had been given a room that already had someone in it. And she was furious at our interruption.

It was a very strange day. Planes struck by lightning and mysteriously double-booked room. Like I was trying to check into the hotel of my life only to discover that there was already someone inside. Very odd.

I ordered take out. From a place that…I have never been able to order from again. Every time I am in Paris, I try to order from them, just to see, and every time, the order goes through and then it is mysteriously cancelled.

When I think about that end to the trip, it really does feel like something in it is trying to delete itself from the reel of my life. Like a self-erasure.

Anyway, I hope this ghost story is sufficient enticement to order the book.

b