How Are You Going to Save Yourself? (2018) by JM Holmes

 1001 Novels: A Library of America

How Are You Going to Save Yourself? (2018)

 by JM Holmes

Pawtucket, Rhode Island

Rhode Island: 3/9

   I checked out this book of interlinked short stories of a group of bi-racial and African American men growing up in Pawtucket, Rhode Island as an Audiobook from the library and instantly regretted the choice.   Holmes has an authentic voice, to a fault, almost, and the entire book is written in a locked in first-person narrative that switches in between the members of the friend group (there are four of them) with Gio, a bi-racial Cornell graduate working as a teacher outside Ithaca,  emerging as the central figure.

    I would have much preferred to have read the difficult prose- particularly the sex stuff, of which there is a lot and it is graphic and also there are certainly interactions that could be interpreted as rape.  There's a gangbang of a minor- none of it is horrific but the casualness of the interactions are enough to give even a hardened libertine pause.  Many of the stories crackle with the tension that characterize interactions between young African-American men and authority figures of all sorts.  On that scale, Gio and his buddies hardly rate- there are no arrests, no jail time, no prison sentence.  In fact, the most accurate comparison for Gio and his cohort are other privileged teens from other upper middle class urban areas- regardless of race.

  Anyway- kudos to author JM Holmes for keeping shit so very real.  I did not think that the 1001 Novels project was going to pick a book where a central theme would prove to be the emotions surrounding race-play in interracial relationships (don't google that term without safe search set "on").  I do wish I had read it instead of listened to it.  I think Holmes is the second African-American/bi-racial author in the 1001 Novels list so far.