'Black Deutschland': Quest to escape America's racial fetters

By Darryl Pinckney

Farrar, Straus & Giroux.

304 pp. $26

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Reviewed by Mike Fischer

Jed Goodfinch, the protagonist of Darryl Pinckney's

Black Deutschland

, is a gay expatriate in 1980s Berlin. In the first paragraph, Goodfinch - after conjuring the ghost of Christopher Isherwood, another gay man who went to Berlin in search of himself - cops to a vision of Berlin as a place featuring "white boys who wanted to atone for Germany's crimes by loving a black boy like me."

In his native Chicago, Goodfinch has dropped out of college, disappointing his Hyde Park parents, and gone through drug and alcohol rehab. "I may have fallen apart in the city of my birth," Goodfinch tells us. "But the city of my rebirth would see me put back together again."

And why is Jed sure that Berlin best offers "the chance to be another me"? As we move through the 1980s and revisit Jed's late 20s and early 30s, it becomes clear that 1980s West Berlin is attractive to Jed for some of the same reasons Weimar Berlin drew Isherwood.

"The Wall," Jed tells us, "made the lucky part of Berlin artificial" - removed, he adds later, from "the world of facts."

A collection of artists, drifters, and misfits, it's a city where one can be whomever one wants to be. "You could write your own ticket, regard the city as backdrop, a theatrical setting, and appropriate the citizens as extras for your daily dramas, your tremendous inner opera buffa," Jed observes.

So much for theory.

Chicago keeps pulling Jed back, reminding him and Cello, his high-flying, Berlin-dwelling second cousin, of a time when they had been black and fat in what had once been dubbed America's White City. Back when kids at school had assumed that this fat kid's mother was the woman "on the pancake box."

Jed's periodic visits home trigger flashbacks to the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.'s struggle to integrate Cicero when Jed was a child. One vivid set piece takes place when Jed is home during the 1987 funeral of Harold Washington, the first African American mayor of Chicago.

Jed makes clear that even for privileged members of the Talented Tenth, race in America always gets in the way of people becoming themselves. It's no accident that this book invokes expats including W.E.B. DuBois, Nina Simone, and Josephine Baker - although not Richard Wright, another Chicagoan who sought refuge in Europe, writing a novel there featuring a similarly isolated intellectual.

Pinckney's writing is much cooler. Black Deutschland not only channels Isherwood, it also suggests Ellison's Invisible Man and Teju Cole's more recent Open City. All three novels tell of outsiders of sharp observation and sardonic humor - outsiders more comfortable watching than participating.

"I'd lived my life camping out in other people's stories," Jed tells us, "waiting for my own to begin, but unable to get out of the great head and into my actual."

"She blew me a kiss," he says later of a woman with whom he celebrated on the night the Berlin Wall died. "But I was still alone."

As densely allusive as Black Deutschland can be, Jed's emotional distance from the people, places, and historic events surrounding him ensures that we see the novel's characters and context through a dark glass, as shadows flitting across the screen of his mind. Lost in his own head, Jed also occasionally loses us.

Pinckney's structure compounds the challenge: His novel is built as a series of fragmentary vignettes floating on Jed's stream of consciousness.

But each of those vignettes comes our way through writing that's consistently trenchant and fresh. The heavily placarded walls of his favorite bar "looked like the inside of a shoe box of secrets." Cello's tempestuous life is "an Ibsen play in blackface." "The Weimar Republic was the reason people lost faith in the Weimar Republic."

Writing like that makes it easy to keep faith with Black Deutschland and its lonely protagonist, even as he struggles to believe in either the world or himself.

This review originally appeared in the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel.