by Robert Jones Jr.
Incantatory prettiness muffles this important story’s impact.
Thinking about my experience of reading this book, I’m reminded of those oddly-worded form rejection letters I used to get from literary journals. “Thank you for submitting x, but this piece is not for us.”
I love to be thrust into time and place, into characters’ lives, through a muscular narrative style. I desire musicality in the wordplay, but only so much that it clarifies and deepens this experience. The narrative strategy Jones employs here is beautiful, to be sure, imbued with, if I can infer from his long acknowledgements, a respect for the cadences of the Bible and the verbal inventiveness of the Black church. (I could be wrong about this. If I am, please let me know.)
Though this may be your cup of tea, to me the incantatory prettiness makes nearly everything feel approximate.
As an example, we’re told the lover/protagonists, Samuel and Isaiah, are responsible for the animals in the barn, but not how exactly or what animals they care for. (In contrast: another rural gay love story, the movie “God’s Own Country,” which is, among other things, nearly a primer in animal husbandry.) Their lovemaking in the barn is similarly obscured by poetic stylishness.
The lack of specificity about the goings-on in the barn is curious, given the lovers rarely leave it. This, on top of seeming improbable, limits their interactions with others. Not an effective narrative strategy for dynamic fiction, where characters need to rub up against each other as much as possible.
This limitation is applied to most of the characters, each walled off in separate chapters. The result is a series of studies that mostly only allude to communal life on the plantation. (In contrast to Colson Whitehead’s “Underground Railroad,” where plantation living fairly leaps from the page.)
The characters do rub up against each other eventually, in ‘the Fucking Place’ where they are required to procreate, and in the conclusion, when the carefully managed violence on the plantation breaks its bounds. Even in this ending, the impact is muted by being told lyrically, at distance. It’s a pity, really. I so wanted to love “The Prophets.” It’s a great untold story that needs to be known. { Cross-posted at goodreads. }