Caryl Phillips’s 12th work of fiction, “Another Man in the Street,” opens with Victor Johnson, a cane cutter’s son from St. Kitts, traveling to London by ship at night. He is self-contained, bookish, innocent despite his cynicism — and as such stories often go, disappointment and bitterness probably await. The ship’s white captain baits him about immigrants: “It’s the ’60s now and we’re still letting you in. We’re only a small wee island and we can’t take all of you.”
When I read a novel that belongs to no obvious genre, I begin to anticipate themes it might examine, and how its form will reflect a certain view of the world. “Another Man in the Street” often obstructs such anticipation. In the second chapter, Victor — our protagonist and anchor in the narrative — disappears, and instead we have a new narrator, a white man with no name. Through his perspective, we begin to discern a Black man called Lucky, a vague marginal figure on the lowest rung of a pub in Notting Hill where they both work. Eventually we learn that Lucky is Victor — both names are sadly ironic — though it’s 20 pages before we know this (almost a tenth of the novel’s length), and the nickname is never explained. By now, other characters have been introduced, some important, others not, and the story is confusing for reasons that aren’t clear.
Phillips’s best work can be practically Shakespearean in the way he uses a kind of prose soliloquy to illuminate his characters’ lives. What ensues in this book, however, is harder to celebrate. There is range — Caribbean immigrants, working-class whites, a Holocaust survivor — but the book’s leaps in time and place are distracting, require a lot of summarized backfill, and the result can feel like a baggy Victorian novel compressed to 200 pages. There is a lack of emotional pressure behind the words. History — “It’s the ’60s now” — is signposted but not explored.
Victor finds work as a rent collector for a Jewish slumlord, Peter Feldman, the aforementioned Holocaust survivor. Victor then becomes a journalist whose career is limited and deformed by racism, echoing destructively in his mind and soul. Through Feldman, he meets Ruth, a white working-class woman, who loves Victor despite his smoldering inwardness, and stays with him till the end of his life, when he finally confronts the magnitude of what he lost when he left St. Kitts for the “motherland.”
This is the “what” of the novel. It’s the “how” that’s perplexing. Phillips’s “The Nature of Blood” (1997) is one of the most powerful imaginings of the Holocaust, and of Jew hatred in general, that I’ve ever read. But the portrayal here of Feldman, one of the three major characters, is mysteriously affectless. His mother, Maria (an odd name for a Jew, though maybe she isn’t one), is married stereotypically to a tailor who is “preoccupied with his business. Single- or double-breasted? Padded shoulders or tapered at the waist? … These days, rather than consider Maria’s needs, he would grapple with the question of whether he needed to restock the ribbons and the buttons and the laces that he sold, or first order more fabric that the customers might buy to fashion garments for themselves.”
I tried to ascribe this dead prose to the characters, but the tone is too distant for that. “After all, they were not religious people,” we are told of the family, “and they did not go out of their way to advertise their origins or beliefs. Both at home and at work, they spoke the national language.”
The choice to avoid the word “Jew” or to not specify what “national language” is being spoken — where geographically the scene is even taking place — baffled me. I was seven pages into the section when I wrote in the margin: “Wait … it’s the Holocaust?”
It would be a stretch, but one might argue that the vagueness of Peter and his story is a way of not seeing him, just as Victor, another immigrant in London, is not seen by those around him. They both fade out ignominiously at the end of their lives. They are each, in that way, just “another man in the street.”
“You people think that if you’re polite and pretend that something isn’t happening then it might just go away and not bother you again,” Victor tells Ruth. “Even when I wasn’t sure of what I’m doing, I was always trying to hold on to some dignity. Maybe that’s my mistake, that I try too hard to be dignified when I know full well that all you people see is the color and not the man.”
He seems lost in the story he tells himself, and also lost in this story told about him.
The post What a Caribbean Émigré and a Holocaust Survivor Have in Common appeared first on New York Times.
