In Philadelphia Warren meets Tal, the teenage daughter he never knew he had: “It’s a white girl. Michael Stravato for The New York TimesĬlaiming that title is what “Loving Day” is largely about. “Loving Day” is that rare mélange: cerebral comedy with pathos. It’s a semi-autobiographical one - he has called the book “my coming out as a mulatto” - that can at times feel belabored, but the novel ultimately triumphs because it is razor-sharp, sci-fi-flavored satire in the vein of George Schuyler, playfully evocative of black folklore à la Joel Chandler Harris - yet it never feels like a cold theoretical exercise. In “Loving Day,” Johnson, author of the graphic novel “Incognegro” and the novel “Pym,” delivers an extended literary metaphor about race and mixed-race in America. Let the South of Mom’s ancestry inform the rhythm of my words in a way few white men could pull off.” One ever feels his two-ness, - an American, a Negro two souls, two thoughts, two unreconciled strivings two warring ideals in one dark body.” Except Warren’s body is white, making things even thornier he’s perpetually performing a black identity that isn’t written all over his face - as when he describes “letting my black voice come out, to compensate for my ambiguous appearance. Du Bois called double consciousness, by which the American black person is “always looking at one’s self through the eyes of others. . . “I am a racial optical illusion,” he says. He’s wrecked, too, by his liminal racial status: His father was an Irishman, his mother was black and he comfortably claims neither - call him a man divided against himself. An “inept” comic book artist - “My work is too realistic, too sober” - he has moved back to America from Wales after a failed business and broken marriage. There are ghosts, mostly of neighborhood crackheads - that is, if we take Warren’s word for it our narrator’s psyche is as wrecked as his inheritance. I see a million things that have to be fixed, restored, corrected, each one impossible and each task mandatory for me to escape again.” I smell the char of the fire, the sweet reek of mold, the insult of mouse urine. I look at the cracks in all the walls, the evidence of a foundation crumbling beneath us. Such a house sits at the heart of Mat Johnson’s ribald, incisive novel “Loving Day.” Bequeathed to the narrator, Warren Duffy, by his deceased father, it’s a roofless, ramshackle mansion in a black neighborhood in Philadelphia: “I look at the buckling floors. “A house divided against itself cannot stand,” Abraham Lincoln declared in his 1858 speech presaging the Civil War.

Incognegro by mat johnson