New people

Danzy Senna

Book - 2017

As the twentieth century draws to a close, Maria is at the start of a life she never thought possible. She and Khalil, her college sweetheart, are planning their wedding. They are the perfect couple, "King and Queen of the Racially Nebulous Prom." Their skin is the same shade of beige. They live together in a black bohemian enclave in Brooklyn, where Khalil is riding the wave of the first dot-com boom and Maria is plugging away at her dissertation, on the Jonestown massacre. They've even landed a starring role in a documentary about "new people" like them, who are blurring the old boundaries as a brave new era dawns. Everything Maria knows she should want lies before her--yet she can't stop daydreaming about an...other man, a poet she barely knows.

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FICTION/Senna Danzy
0 / 1 copies available
Location Call Number   Status
1st Floor FICTION/Senna Danzy Due Apr 16, 2024
Subjects
Published
New York : Riverhead Books 2017.
Language
English
Main Author
Danzy Senna (author)
Physical Description
229 pages ; 22 cm
ISBN
9781594487095
Contents unavailable.
Review by New York Times Review

THE GREAT QUAKE: How the Biggest Earthquake in North America Changed Our Understanding of the Planet, by Henry Fountain. (Broadway, $16.) In 1964, a magnitude 9.2 earthquake - the second strongest in history - rocked Alaska. In one town, the resulting tidal wave swept away a third of the residents. Fountain, a climate reporter for The Times, describes the aftereffects, including the rise of the study of plate tectonics. CONVERSATIONS WITH FRIENDS, by Sally Rooney. (Hogarth, $17.) Frances and Bobbi, two young writers in Dublin, are more than best friends: they're each other's editors and confidantes. Frances's affair with Nick, the husband of an older photographer whom the women befriend, sets their relationship adrift. The novel gives a satisfying voice to an intellectual, complex female friendship. THE LAST CASTLE: The Epic Story of Love, Loss, and American Royalty in the Nation's Largest Home, by Denise Kieman. (Touchstone, $17.) At 175,000 square feet, the Biltmore estate in Asheville, N.C., was the largest private home in the country when it was completed in 1895 by a Vanderbilt heir. Kieman trains a wide lens on Gilded Age America, particularly after the 1929 stock market crash imperiled the family's fortunes. FOREST DARK, by Nicole Krauss. (Harper Perennial, $16.99.) Two successful Americans - a celebrated but stalled writer, and an older lawyer - return to Israel to reconcile their divided selves. Krauss's illuminating novel toys with questions of identity that resist easy answers. The book centers on characters who "have it all but nonetheless have begun to wander aimlessly across their own lives," our reviewer, Peter Orner, wrote. "Israel, impossible and messy as it is, becomes a conduit for new possibilities." RANGER GAMES: A True Story of Soldiers, Family and an Inexplicable Crime, by Ben Blum. (Anchor, $16.95.) What drove the author's cousin, an Army Ranger, to participate in a robbery days before his deployment to Iraq? As Blum investigates, examining his cousin's gauzy explanations, his story becomes a meditation on social coercion, the limits of human agency and his family's improbable kindred spirits. NEW PEOPLE, by Danzy Senna. (Riverhead, $16.) It's New York in the '90s, and Maria and Khalil, college sweethearts from Stanford, appear to be a mixed-race poster couple; together, "they look like the end of a story." Our critic Parul Sehgal praised this funny and sinister novel, which riffs on Senna's hallmark themes: "what happens when races and cultures mingle in the home - and under the skin."

Copyright (c) The New York Times Company [August 23, 2019]
Review by Booklist Review

Senna (You Are Free, 2011) follows engaged couple Maria and Khalil, mixed-race lovers living in the post-racial Brooklyn of the late 1990s. They met in college, where Maria opened Khalil up to the depth of his own blackness. Khalil was bred by parents who never taught him to notice the color of his skin. When he and Maria got together, they became the prized power pair within their social universe. Maria, as twentysomethings about to enact permanent romantic commitment are wont to do, feels trapped by her ethnically ambiguous ever-after. She begins behaving erratically, sneaking into random apartments and pretending to be the nanny of infant children, and hiding under the bed of a handsome stranger while he makes love to her soon-to-be sister-in-law. Senna's meditation on 1996 America and its false sense of progress is an eerie picture of society today, too. With a dark sense of humor, Senna builds her story with a horror-like tension that releases with a tongue-in-cheek sigh. Sure to keep readers riding white-knuckled to the end.--Eathorne, Courtney Copyright 2017 Booklist

From Booklist, Copyright (c) American Library Association. Used with permission.
Review by Publisher's Weekly Review

Senna (Caucasia) returns to long-form fiction in a muddled third novel featuring a protagonist in search of her identity. It's 1996 in slowly gentrifying New York, and 27-year-old Maria and her college sweetheart Khalil, both mixed-race, are planning their wedding. They're also the stars of a new documentary called New People about interracial couples. But there's a catch-one that grows comically large as the story progresses: Maria's obsessed with a soft-spoken, brown-skinned poet whom she barely knows, but suspects is her soul mate. Her stalking takes on an air of implausibility as she sneaks into his apartment building, impersonates the next door neighbor's nanny, and crawls into his open window while he's not home-and those aren't even the worst of her creepy maneuvers. Interspersed with her complaining about the state of her otherwise stable current relationship with Khalil are flashbacks to her disastrous dating life in college before she met and "saved" him from being the "token... cool black guy at the frat party"; discussions about racism and white privilege; remembrances of her adopted mother before she died from breast cancer at 49; and a side plot involving Maria's attempts to finish her dissertation on the mass suicide at Jonestown. Significant themes and issues are touched upon here but unfortunately get lost before fully landing. (Aug.) © Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.

(c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved
Review by Library Journal Review

Senna (Caucasia), the child of a Caucasian poet mother and an African American scholar father, bestows her own middle name, Maria, to her newest mixed-race protagonist, one half of an engaged couple who share the same favorite song, films, novel, even "skin the same shade of beige." -Having met at Stanford, Khalil and Maria now live in Brooklyn, he creating a start-up, she finishing her dissertation. Their imagined future includes "a tribe of children.and a big hairy dog named Thurgood." Despite the outward perfection, Maria's commitment is wavering as her obsession for a nameless "poet" manifests into stalking, stealing, breaking and entering-even baby-sitting. Kristen Ariza narrates Senna's complex, brilliant, post-racial takedown with fluid ease, convincingly even-keeled despite Maria's antics-from the insidious (a prank call threatening lynching) to the pitiful. VERDICT Libraries should provide Senna's sly, provoking, dazzling latest in all formats. ["A great read, both compelling and thoughtful. The narrative has a page-turning urgency, as Maria tumbles toward a disaster of her own making, while her musings on race shift between provocative and cynical": LJ 6/1/17 starred review of the Riverhead hc.]-Terry Hong, Smithsonian -BookDragon, Washington, DC © Copyright 2018. 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

Khalil and Maria, biracial Stanford graduates whose Martha's Vineyard wedding will be featured in the New York Times, hit a bump in the road when Maria develops a crush on another man.Khalil Mirsky is the dreadlocked, Hacky Sack-playing son of a Jewish man and an African-American woman, "the only black guy at the frat partythe Hootie in his Blowfish." Maria Pierce is so light that white people make racist jokes in front of her, thus suffering "that particular rage of the light-skinned individual," as her black adoptive mother puts it. From the moment they get together, Khalil and Maria are the "King and Queen of the Racially Nebulous Prom," their skin "the same shade of beige"or as Khalil describes it to the woman filming them for a documentary called "New People," "a Woody Allen movie, with melanin." Maria is more cynical about their biracial fairy tale, their Brooklyn lifestyle, the future baby they'll name Indigo or Thelonious Mirsky-Pierce, "the messiah of Mulatto Nation." Her second thoughts take the form of an obsessive crush on a poet who is not a New Person, a "brown-skinned black boy with a shaved headthe body, the skin, the face that cabdrivers pretend not to see." Senna's (You Are Free, 2011, etc.) fearless novel is equal parts beguiling and disturbing, and nowhere more so than in a hilarious, ultimately terrifying series of events that begins when a tired white lady mistakes Maria for her nanny, Consuela, and leaves her in charge of her infant. Senna combines the clued-in status details you'd find in a New York magazine article with the narrative invention of big-league fiction. Every detail and subplot, including Maria's dissertation on the Jonestown massacre and her buried secret about a college prank gone awry, is resonant. A great book about race and a great book all around.!!! Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.

Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.

She wasn't expecting to see him here tonight. Now, her face feels warm as she watches him step onto the stage and pick up the microphone. He stands like a teenager, slouched and ambivalent, hands shoved in his pockets, as if he's been forced to appear, forced to read his poetry before strangers. Maria first met him several months ago--and now, it seems, he is everywhere she looks. Or maybe she is everywhere he looks. Just last week she ran into him at a restaurant. He was there--sitting at the bar alone, drinking a beer--when she arrived to meet a friend. She stopped to say hello and he said a polite hello back, frowning as if he couldn't remember her name. Afterward, she sat only half listening to her friend rattle on about work, conscious with every breath of his form at the bar. In the audience, listening to his voice, she realized her that she has been waiting to see him again. She feels uneasy with this awareness. She keeps her eyes fixed on his sneakers, which are dirty and giant. It is too much to look at his face. Her fiancé, Khalil, sits beside her. Khalil's sister, Lisa, sits on the other side. They flank her. The audience around her, who moments before were laughing and hooting at the last performer, a girl who swung her lorg hair from side to side, seems to have gone unusually still, alert, as if at the precipice of some new awareness. Khalil places a hand on Maria's knee and leans in and whispers, This guy's pretty good. She nods, glancing away from the stage toward the back of the club. It is raining outside. Maria thinks she should tell Khalil she feels sick and wants to go home--because in a way, this is true. But she doesn't. She stays seated, her face turned away toward the exit and when it's all over, she follows Khalil and Lisa to the front of the club; they both want to say hello. She hangs back, ­listening to them speak. Lisa is saying something about a line she likes from his penultimate poem. That's the word she uses. Penultimate . Khalil is smiling, nodding in agreement. The poet looks embarrassed by their praise. He keeps scratching his arm as he stares at the floor. Maria hovers in the background, her fists clenched in her pockets. The poet's eyes discover her. You good? he says. She nods, chokes out the lie: I'm good. In her dream that night she is sitting on a blue velvet sofa, reading the pages of a friend's novel. She realizes in the dream that it is a perfect story she is reading. She is miserable that she did not write it. She knows she will never write a book like this. She will never write a work of fiction. She is a scholar; she only works with given materials. She wakes up hot with envy. She has to remind herself that the novel doesn't exist outside of her dream, nor does the friend who wrote it. Khalil is asleep beside her. There is a ticking sound coming from the kitchen. Maria closes her eyes, thinking of the poet. She remembers his face and the way he stood half-turned away from the audience. She remembers, with photographic clarity, the slope of his forehead and the small scar cutting through his eyebrow. Warmth and a kind of preemptive grief move through her body. Khalil looks politely bored in his sleep, as if he's listening to somebody recounting a dream. Maria is twenty-seven. She is engaged to marry Khalil, who loves her unequivocally. She is the one he has been waiting for his whole life. Maria loves Khalil. She never doubts this. He is the one she needs, the one who can repair her. They met in college on the other coast years ago, so they have, in a sense, grown up together. It is sometimes hard for Maria to see where one of them ends and the other begins. Their favorite song is Al Green's "Simply Beautiful." Their favorite movies are Sammy and Rosie Get Laid , Chameleon Street , and Nothin' But a Man . Their favorite comic book is Why I Hate Saturn . Their favorite novel is Giovanni's Room . Khalil says they make each other complete. Their skin is the same shade of beige. Together, they look like the end of a story. They live together in Brooklyn in a neighborhood that is changing. It is November 1996. Interspersed among the old guard--the Jamaican ladies with their folding chairs, the churchy men in their brown polyester suits--are the ones who have just arrived. It is subtle, this shift, almost imperceptible. When Maria blurs her eyes right it doesn't appear to be happening. They dance together at house parties in the dark. If I ruled the world , they sing, their voices rising as one, imagine that. I'd free all my sons. Maria is writing a dissertation. She has been granted a small fellowship to live on in this final year, so she can focus on completion; it isn't enough to foot their bills, but Khalil carries the rest. Khalil works in computers. He makes enough as a part-time technology consultant to support them both. His real passion is the business he and a friend from college are trying to get off the ground. Khalil has explained their plan to Maria--it will be an online community of like-minded souls, modern tribalism at its best. He says it will make them rich someday. He is looking for investors. He has utter faith in his enterprise. Maria spends her days at the social science library on 118th and Amsterdam, poring over materials from a long gone time and place. It is fall and she has come to rely on rituals to get her work done. She wears the same peacoat and the same red gauzy scarf. She stops at the same deli and orders the same thing from the burly guy behind the counter, a buttered bialy and a coffee, light and sweet. She keeps the same assortment of snacks in her purse: a bag of salted cashews, a chocolate bar, a bottle of water. There is a window beside her carrel where she sometimes pauses to watch the cold air sharpening the edges of buildings. She has decided all university campuses are alike--the sense of possibility and stasis. She thinks this too: all graduate students, if you look closely enough, exude the same aura of privilege and poverty. The photo on Maria's university ID is now four years old. It was taken the year she and Khalil moved here from California. In the picture she looks like a different Maria. It isn't just the golden brown of her skin, and it isn't just her bangs, which hang long over her eyes. It is her smile, crooked and loose, and the expression in her eyes, some barely contained hilarity. She looks preserved in the moment before you burst into laughter. She can no longer remember what was so funny. Maria's subject is Jonestown, the Peoples Temple. She entered the program planning to study seventies-era intentional communities--the bonds of kinship forged among unrelated people. Once she started investigating Jonestown, she could not look away. She knew then only the most basic facts, the ones that had become part of the detritus of the culture: That Jonestown was a cult. That their leader, Jim Jones, wore sunglasses everywhere. That he and his followers committed mass suicide together one day in the jungles of South America by drinking the Kool-Aid. The question that guided her then was the most banal, the one posed by all holocausts: How does such a thing happen? She was guided by a line from Juvenal's Satires: Nobody becomes depraved overnight. Now, so many years into it, her focus has shifted. She wants to know not how they died but how they kept ­themselves going. There is no memorial to the people of Jonestown. The remote jungle in Guyana that they cleared, where they built a society, has long been reclaimed by vegetation. The last visitor to the site reported finding only the barest remnants of what once was: a tractor engine, a rusting file cabinet, the metal drum they had used to poison the liquid before they drank it. The music they made--the tapes they recorded--are all that is left of the people who lived there. They sang in the early days in Indiana where it began. They sang while they rode the fleet of Greyhound buses from Indianapolis to Ukiah, California. They sang when they arrived in Guyana, while they cleared the cassava and palm trees with machetes. They sang while they cooked the rice and oily gravy that was their main diet. They sang while they cared for the children in the Cuffy Nursery. They sang in the beginning and they sang at the end. It is all on tape. Maria is trying to write about their music--an ethnomusicology of the Peoples Temple. She is trying to uncover the modes of resistance in the hymns and melodies they recorded when they were alive. She is trying to excavate, using their music, the clues not to why they would commit suicide but to how they survived as long as they did. She argued in her proposal that the music was a form of resistance to Jim Jones himself. Her project is going to be--is supposed to be--a radical reclamation of Jonestown on behalf of the people who built it. The last time Maria saw her mentor, a tall haunted man, he was packing up his office to go on sabbatical. He told her he didn't think she'd found it yet, the true meaning of her work. He said, You're still circling the jungle, Maria. You're still afraid to land. When they said goodbye at the door to his office, he asked her if she was dreaming about Jonestown yet. Did it come to her at night? She told him no, she wasn't dreaming of it yet. He smiled and said, Then you're not working hard enough. They need to be in your dreams. Maria shows up every day. And every day she comes upon a new revelation about the people of Jonestown. Just the other day she discovered that the hand-painted sign they kept hanging in their pavilion, the one that read, Those who do not remember the past are condemned to repeat it , was a slight misquote of a line from George Santayana; the real quote said those who "cannot" remember the past. It seems to her this was a serious error, but she can't figure out why. Today she closes her eyes and listens to an audiocassette of the Peoples Temple Choir album. It was released in 1973 when they were still based in the church front on Geary Boulevard in San Francisco. A copy of the actual LP is wrapped in plastic in the special collections library across campus. She has held it in her hands. On the cover is a photograph, a hundred choir members standing at the edge of a lake. The women are wearing floor-length blue satin gowns and the men are wearing starched white shirts. They look somehow both old-timey and hip, just like the music they make, which sounds a little bit gospel, a little bit rock and roll. The first cut is the children's song. They sound so clear and bright that she feels as if they are here with her. Their voices rise and fall with what she imagines is the conductor's baton. He keeps me singing a happy song. He keeps me singing it all day long. Although my days may be drear, He always is near, And that's why my heart is always filled with song. The. next time she sees the poet, she is walking through the village, going to meet Khalil for lunch with friends. It's a cold afternoon. The weather has turned. She has just come from the library. She is wearing her peacoat and her red scarf. She sees him before he sees her. He's standing up ahead looking in the window of a record shop. She catches her breath and stops several feet away. The restaurant where she's headed is up around the block and she is already a few minutes late, but instead of going on her way she just stands there stiffly until the poet looks up and sees her. He does a double take, squints at her, as if trying to remember how he knows her. Then he smiles slightly and walks toward her. Hey, you, he says. She says his name aloud, thinking, not for the first time, that he doesn't remember hers. They've met several times in loud places, and they've shaken hands, but she cannot recall him ever once saying her name. She is too embarrassed to tell it to him now. Where you headed? Meeting a friend. She looks away, toward the street, the omission burning on her tongue. You live around here? She tells him she lives in Brooklyn. He makes a face. Do you like it there? Then, before she can answer, he says: I hate Brooklyn. I never go there if I can help it. She feels stung, as if he has just admitted to hating her. She wants to tell him Brooklyn was Khalil's idea, that he got it in his head long ago, before they left California, before they talked all senior year about wanting to join the Brooklyn Renaissance. But she doesn't say it. There is a long, full silence. He is watching her. She feels his gaze as a physical thing, a heat moving across her skin. When his eyes move away her skin feels cold again. Hey, you're friends with Lisa and Khalil, right? She nods. Right. I remember you. She pauses. I'm going to meet them. Don't let me keep you, he says, stepping aside to let her pass. He is already looking beyond her at something in the distance, and she feels the cold again. She thinks maybe she's coming down with something. She starts forward, but stops and turns back. Do you even know my name? she asks. He scratches his cheek, shrugs. Looks a little caught. Maybe, he says. It's Maria. I wasn't sure--because you never say it. His eyes are amused. Maria, he says. Maria. Maria. Maria. She laughs, tilts her face down, and walks away, her heart galloping. At the end of the block she glances back to see him still standing in front of the record shop. He is watching her, but he turns away when she spots him ­looking. When she arrives at the restaurant, Khalil and Lisa are already there, at a table at the back with three other people. Khalil is wearing his faded X T-shirt from college. His dreadlocks have long since passed the Basquiat stage but have not quite arrived at Marley. Excerpted from New People by Danzy Senna All rights reserved by the original copyright owners. Excerpts are provided for display purposes only and may not be reproduced, reprinted or distributed without the written permission of the publisher.