Note: New reviews, of Carys Davies’ Clear for Chicago Review of Books, and of Téa Obreht’s The Morningside for RealClearBooks, are up here and here.
We Are a Haunting. By Tyriek White. New York: Astra House, 2024. 272 pp. $18.00.
Tyriek White’s debut from last year, We Are a Haunting, out on April 16th in paperback, is so ineptly crafted that it’s difficult to keep a hold of its people, places, happenings, and ideas as you read it. They are seen through a glass darkly enough that you will sometimes despair of remembering who, where, and what. You can barely get to what the book is about, so distracting are the many technical problems. The novel is phenomenal. Its surface phenomena baffle and frustrate; they amuse and arouse curiosity. A synopsis, while one can still just about patch it together. A young man named Colly grows up in the 2000s, in East New York, a Brooklyn neighborhood too deprived to have a real name. He and his sister Toya will both make it to college, but in the meantime, their mother Key has died, and their father Dante neglects them. With his friend Zaire, Colly skives off school and scraps with kids in the neighborhood. Colly also sees dead people, fellow sufferers from the community who linger there as ghosts, and often addresses himself to his mother. Chapters of his narrative alternate with those of Key’s, in another timeline starting in 1987 in the same neighborhood. Key, a doula, has Colly’s supernatural power which she inherited in turn from her mother, Audrey. She has her difficulties with Dante, including visions of his death. She reads books which she will leave to Colly and ponders the imponderables. Interspersed are sections in the third person which deal with Audrey’s life, her memories of North Carolina, separation from her husband Virgil, and her dread of losing her public housing.