Review by New York Times Review
IF YOU IMAGINE a satirical "The Indian Princess," James Nelson Barker's 1808 libretto about Pocahontas, or a macabre "E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial," you might come close to T. Geronimo Johnson's second novel, "Welcome to Braggsville." This is a prototypical encounter narrative, rippling with irony, in which four Berkeley students visit Braggsville, a segregated Georgia town, population 712, smaller than their freshman class. Their adventure begins at a Berkeley discussion circle, when Daron Davenport, the novel's white hero, reveals that his native Braggsville hosts Civil War re-enactments celebrating the Confederacy. Horrified, the students decide the town needs to be taught a lesson. So a band of friends, calling themselves "the Four Little Indians," head South to stage a "performative intervention." Daron is an endearing naïf trying to find himself in multicultural Berkeley; Louis, a Malaysian student "who looked Chinese to some and Indian to others," is an aspiring "kung-fu comedian" and fancies himself "the next Lenny Bruce Lee"; Charlie is a preppy black football player, who considers himself "a great conciliator" like Barack Obama; and Candice is a blonde from Iowa who claims to have Native American blood. Their plot elects Louis and Candice to stage a lynching dressed as slaves, while Daron and Charlie interview townspeople and faux-Confederate soldiers about the drama. In the novel, irony appears like a character itself, alongside its kissing cousins sarcasm and dissonance. After the protest goes awry, two of the students believe they are being led to a hospital room to visit an injured friend, but they're led into the coroner's room instead, to identify their friend's corpse. On a cold slab table, Louis is lying flat on his back, "his open eyes staring straight ahead, like when he was drunk or playing possum." The town sheriff wants to get to the bottom of the disastrous prank that precipitated the death, so he interrogates Charlie: "Mr. Chicago, you're young for a sophomore. About two years younger than the others, it looks." The student replies, "I graduated early." The sheriff says, "You went to one of them fancy stay-away schools. So you're a smart one?" Charlie explains, "I've mastered adaptive testing, which transforms the examination into an assessment of strategy more than knowledge." Awkward silence. The student elaborates, "I'm good at taking tests, sir." The sheriff is unconvinced: "But it never occurred to a smart fellow like you that this was a bad idea?... Says here your major is business administration and accounting. You topping that sundae with criminal justice?" As sharp comedy should, the scene flirts with stereotypes, lingers in the familiar, then pivots to afford the characters their humanity. The black man getting interrogated by a white sheriff, an enduring trope in American literature, becomes a juicy set piece in Johnson's skilled telling. "Welcome to Braggsville" doesn't serve up a defenseless victim at the mercy of law enforcement, but a well-spoken young man parrying with a sheriff whose folksy talk betrays his cunning. Each is self-consciously aware, leery of playing to stereotype. Charlie explains the fatal anti-Confederate protest to the sheriff by way of "change agents": "These various roles are all enactments of concretized ideologies. Judith Butler, for example, says gender is a performance, sir." The novel's encounters fold in on one another like origami, in artful layers. Daron, a first-generation college student, encounters the upscale hothouse liberalism of "Berzerkeley." The Berkeley foursome encounters Braggsville, "The City That Love Built in the Heart of Georgia." And Daron encounters the Gully, the black part of his hometown. No main character here leaves a cross-cultural encounter caricatured. But no one leaves unscathed. Reading this novel is not unlike listening to an erudite satirist play the dozens in a marathon performance. When Candice declares her parents "emotionally abusive," Daron takes it to mean "she wasn't as spoiled as she would have preferred." Genuinely baffled as to why a white college girl would traipse all the way to his small town to protest a Civil War reenactment, the sheriff interrogates Candice, too. She explains that she dressed as a slave for her anti-Confederate protest because her art required she go big: "Gabriel García Márquez never wrote a novel called 'Love in the Time of Cold and Flu Season.'" As the authorities persist, Candice digs in. "It's the theater of the real," she insists. "Like holding a magnifying glass to life. It can be critical remixes, too. Someone in our class took a scene from 'Seinfeld' and the dialogue from 'All in the Family' and mixed them to prove that the shows were not much different. 'All in the Family Seinfeld.'" Although the millennial characters may prattle indiscriminately, this novel need not have. The metaphors and similes, now and again, feel too numerous or overwrought, detracting from the unquestionable quality of the satire. There's a sense of oversharing, no firm editorial hand to allow only that which matters. Is all of it necessary? Not really. A recurring reference to Six Flags grows tedious. Interludes in which Johnson's prose veers toward a Junot Díaz-style free-flow in second person - "You found, though, that the more you tried looking at Candice and not thinking about her as a body, but as a person, the more you thought about her body" - never measure up to the rest. After a few choice exchanges - whether with an F.B.I. agent, or a Berkeley professor who challenges his homegrown masculinity every time she inadvertently makes him cry, or a slippery black pol who bests him on TV - Daron learns something essential about himself. Johnson teases us with plot expectations based on stereotypes, and on Daron's lack of understanding, then ventures several hairpin story turns. When, for instance, Daron accuses Charlie of raping Candice, and Charlie later comes out as gay, Daron's false accusation raises the stakes beyond the elevated platitudes of his Berkeley seminars and the know-it-all liberalism of his clever, yet unwise, peers. The students may have traveled cross-country to fake a hate crime, but their theatrics implies considerable self-deception. As part of the performance, Louis puts on blackface and a wig described as "part of last year's Disco Ronald McDonald Reagan Halloween costume" before his friends hoist him up a tree; when he sees the Confederacy reenactors drawing close, Louis feels calm - confident, even: "How could they hurt a hanged man?" Flush with good intentions, the Four Little Indians plan to teach the denizens of Braggsville a historical lesson, but they have no idea of the pain and context of the history they are invoking. DARON CONSTANTLY WORRIES that his family and community will mistake the stunt for hate speech, and a critic may wonder the same. How far can satire push before curdling into hate or even hollow air quotes? But the satire leaping off these pages is not hate, nor the dead-end cynical variety that withers with a sneer. Here, the observations have too much wit and knowing, the characters too much soul, for Johnson's story to feel trapped in callow hipster irony. Organic, plucky, smart, "Welcome to Braggsville" is the funniest sendup of identity politics, the academy and white racial anxiety to hit the scene in years. Recent racial satires like the film "Dear White People" or Tom Wolfe's novel "Back to Blood" fumble to light dead fuses, poke around in long-abandoned attics or simply shoot blanks; they lack a true understanding of where America's many racial conundrums actually lie. Johnson, by contrast, knows just which dark corners to expose, which cultural buttons to push, which ironies to illuminate and how to whirl an affecting yarn all the while. A first-generation college student encounters the upscale liberalism of 'Berzerkeley.' RICH BENJAMIN, the author of "Searching for Whitopia: An Improbable Journey to the Heart of White America," is completing a novel on money, loss and heterosexual melancholy.
Copyright (c) The New York Times Company [February 8, 2015]
Review by Booklist Review
In his second novel, after Hold It 'til It Hurts (2012), Johnson continues his unique inquiry into questions of race and class, this time with a satiric edge. Southerner D'aron Davenport is having a tough time adjusting in his freshman year at Berkeley (aka Berzerkeley). Then he falls in with fellow misfits Candace, a fresh-faced Iowan who claims Native American heritage; aspiring comic Louis; and black prep-school grad Charlie. When D'aron reveals in history class that his hometown holds an annual Civil War reenactment, his friends decide to stage a performative intervention as a form of protest. However, weighed down by their misconceptions about the South as well as their hyperliberal, overly intellectualized theories about race and history, the students find that their actions have tragic, unintended consequences. In exuberant prose, Johnson takes aim at a host of issues, gleefully satirizing political opportunists, social media, and cultural mores. If, at times, Johnson's ambition causes him to tackle too many subjects at once, this is nevertheless a provocative exploration of contemporary America that is likely to be a hit with adventurous readers.--Wilkinson, Joanne Copyright 2010 Booklist
From Booklist, Copyright (c) American Library Association. Used with permission.
Review by Publisher's Weekly Review
In his second novel, Johnson (Hold It 'Til It Hurts) delivers a funny and tragic coming-of-age story that spares no one its satirical eye. D'aron Little May Davenport, a misfit in his small Georgia town, enrolls at UC Berkeley to get as far away from home as he can. His new roommate, Louis Chang, is an irrepressible fellow completely at home in California, whose fearless determination to be a stand-up comedian offers a "refreshing antidote to the somber, tense mood sweeping campus." Soon they meet Candice, a pretty white Iowan with hair that "glowed like butter on burned toast," and Charlie, a black prep school kid, while they are all being scolded for supposed insensitivity at a dorm party. They quickly become close and call themselves the "4 Little Indians." When D'aron mentions that Braggsville has an annual Civil War reenactment in their American history class, Candice and Louis persuade the group to stage a "performative intervention" over spring break. This is D'aron's story, told from his perspective, but there's a secondary voice, an impish interloper, challenging D'aron and the reader to delve deeper, asking again and again, "Por qué?" Johnson's prose has a sketched-out and dreamlike quality, a private shorthand that adds to the feeling of intimacy, an apt trick when dealing with subject matter like race and class. This ambitious novel stumbles when it departs from its central story, which should be enough: young people clumsily wielding their new tools of critical theory to impress themselves and each other, without fully understanding the effects of their actions. (Feb.) © Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.
(c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved
Review by Library Journal Review
When Braggsville, GA, resident Daron Davenport goes to college in Berkeley, CA, he might as well have gone to another country, so foreign does he feel. However, he's made to feel at home by some students he befriends at a party: Caucasian Candice, who claims Native American blood; Louis, a Malaysian comedian; and Charlie, a gay African American. Inspired by one of their classes, the friends decide to spend their spring break in Daron's hometown, where the annual reenactment of the Civil War will allow them to stage a "performative intervention"-meaning, in this case, a lynching. This scheme has "Bad Idea" written all over it, and the resulting melee reverberates for years to come. VERDICT Johnson's (Hold It 'Til It Hurts) observations about race are both piercing and witty, making this edgy novel so much more complex than a send-up of the South and liberal academe. Johnson is at his best when he's the most straightforward; chapters that take off in stream-of-consciousness Southern dialect unnecessarily confuse the story. But those with a love for linguistic romps will want to take on this literary dark comedy. [See Prepub Alert, 8/11/14.]-Joy Humphrey, Pepperdine Univ. Law Lib., Malibu, CA (c) Copyright 2014. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
(c) Copyright Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
Review by Kirkus Book Review
Four college students' attempt to protest Southern folkways goes awry in a novel that blurs the line between academic satire and social realism. D'aron, the hero of the second novel by Johnson (Hold It 'Til It Hurts, 2012), was raised in the small Georgia town of Braggsville, where he routinely absorbed homophobic abuse. So when he makes his escape to the University of California, Berkeley, he's gratified by the atmosphere of tolerance. (Even if the definitions of tolerant behavior seem endlessly belabored: At one party, students apply dot stickers to the places on their bodies that are acceptable to touch.) D'aron quickly befriends Louis, an Asian aspiring comedian, Candice, an Iowa-born woman who claims to be part Native American, and Charlie, a black athlete. The quartet's shared interest in social protest inspires them to head to Braggsville, where they plan to interrupt a Civil War re-enactment by staging the whipping and hanging of a slave. The novel's opening third plays much of this as comedy, pitting college kids giddy on leftist jargon against retrograde Dixie, but the plan goes badly awry: Louis (in the role of the slave) winds up dead, and Candice (as slavemaster) is distraught, though what actually happened is deliberately vague. As D'aron falls under scrutiny from the town for concocting the plan, he's forced to contemplate the racist underpinnings of Braggsville society and ponder what use his education is (or isn't) when confronting it. Johnson is supremely savvy at capturing the students' ideological earnestness, finding the humor in academic jargon (a faux glossary is included), and exploring the tense divides between blacks and whites in the South. And though the reader might occasionally feel whipsawed by Johnson's shifts in tone from comedy to tragedy, the swerving seems appropriate to the complexity of its theme. A rambunctious, irreverent yet still serious study of the long reach of American institutional racism. Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
