When I feel a bit sad about my reading/blogging focus having shifted to focus so heavily on recent releases, I comfort myself with a reminder that reading recent releases gets me in on the ground floor of new authors. This is fun because when they hit it big, I get to be a hipster about it (in a few years I’m going to be a nightmare about Micaiah Johnson and y’all will all be tired of me), but it’s also fun because I get to see their development as writers. Ideally, with supportive agents and editors, and the sales to support it (sob, capitalism is a hellscape), writers go through their careers becoming more and more like themselves, writing books that are more and more the exact thing they want to write. Even if the thing they become doesn’t quite align with my tastes and I have to hop off the train, it’s still a very cool process to witness a writer achieving their final form.
Tochi Onyebuchi is far too interesting and thoughtful a writer to have achieved his final form with his fifth novel, but I do get the sense that the success of his most recent novella, Riot Baby, and his continuing development as a writer bought him the leeway he needed to write his wonderful, genre-crossing new novel, Goliath. Inasmuch as it has a plot, it’s about the re-gentrification of New Haven. In this future, the wealthy and the white have mostly left earth for space colonies, while those without the means to leave were left to cope with pollution, automated policing, and steadily deteriorating government support. Now, white folks are coming back to New Haven (and Earth more broadly!), which means that governments are starting to care more about clean air and policing the lives of those who never left.
(Sidebar, I lived in New Haven for three months and it was the weirdest place I have ever been. It’s one of those things where like, the segregation and prejudice of the place you’re not from feels the weirdest? Like, I know that segregation happens all over the US, very much including my home state. But the divide between Yale and Not-Yale was so stark, and so mutually suspicious, and white people in New Haven would just say anything to you about non-white New Haven, like, right to my face after knowing me for thirty seconds, and everyone was deeply unfriendly, and tldr it was fucking weird as shit and I was not there long enough to get good at navigating it.)
ANYWAY. Goliath is the second of two 2022 SF novels that I read in January that were no plot, only vibes. Historically this has not been my thing! But I am trying to be more open to different kinds of books and different ways of telling stories, and certainly it’s impossible to read Goliath and wish for it to be anything other than what it is. It’s a dark story, dealing with police brutality, environmental racism, gentrification, housing inequality, and a host of other issues, so it feels a bit weird to talk about it in terms of play. But playing is exactly with Onyebuchi is doing: playing with his setting, with SF conventions, with the city of New Haven, most particularly with genre. Goliath is clearly a work of science fiction, but it ranges widely across genre, sometimes feeling nearly like a hangout sitcom, dabbling in romance, flirting with being a Western. You can sense the author flexing a lot of different muscles to produce a story that feels deeply situated in the time of its writing and simultaneously grimly predictive.
Though Goliath is packed full of people making variable levels of effort at being good, there’s an extent to which the project of goodness is doomed by the bigger systems in which the characters find themselves. The clearest–and most heartbreaking–example of this is the section of the book that tells the story of a successful inmate rebellion at a South Carolina prison in the near future. Because you’re not new here, you know from the first punch thrown that the rebels won’t gain their freedom. (This is obvious even before you read the acknowledgements and learn that Onyebuchi drew inspiration for this section from Heather Ann Thompson’s book on the 1971 Attica Prison Rebellion.) But the exact mechanism by which they lose their shot at a better life is so pointless and futile, yet entirely predictable. It’s hard to feel that anything different could have happened, given the set of circumstances (slavery, environmental racism, the systematic devaluation of Black lives) we started with.
At its rosiest, Goliath is a book about community. One plotline follows a group of young Black adults in New Haven, many of whom are stackers (demolition workers sent to tear down old houses to get materials for new ones), all of whom are faced, again and again, with the stark reality that their lives matter less than those of the gentrifiers. They carve out space for their own joy by the simple act of being together. At times they’re even able to make that space physical, when they find some horses roaming free and ride them back into town and find a place for them to live and be cared for by the community.
But the limits of community are very stark. A white couple, biblically named David and Jonathan, have made a plan to move back to New Haven in the aftermath of their separate griefs. Onyebuchi gives us a glimpse of how the two of them forged their own we, meeting over cigarettes behind a hospital, and those scenes are lovely, compassionate, heartfelt. Except their we excludes Linc and his friends by the very fact of their presence in New Haven. The we of this white family is predicated on the they of Black families who have been in New Haven for generations, who have been left to breathe poisoned air (that’s now being cleaned up so David and Jonathan can breathe it), who are facing a renewed, strengthened police presence (so David and Jonathan can feel safe). We don’t get much sense of David and Jonathan recognizing the forces they’re a part of, or the fact that their relative privilege has enabled them to pursue a new community at the expense of already existing ones.
Though the gentrification is an undeniable blow to the Black communities of New Haven, Onyebuchi is not sentimental about the limits of those communities. As was true for the prison riot and its near-success, and as is true for all of us, Linc and his friends are constrained by the structures they live within. Poverty is not ennobling or romantic, in Onyebuchi’s telling (or, of course, in real life). It is, by design, destructive. The book ends in tragedy, as it must, but Onyebuchi slips in a line to suggest that it’s not the tragedy you’ve been told, not the tragedy you expected.
In another sense, of course, it’s exactly the tragedy you expected, a tragedy that sits in exact alignment with every other tragedy in this book. It’s the triumph of oppressive structures over the people caught up in those structures. Goliath paints a dark picture of the future, by which I mean that it holds up a mirror to the present.