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I have a reviewerly confession to make: I never finished Parable of the Sower. I read every other Octavia Butler book I could get my hands on as a teenager--my favorite was the Imago series, which tugged on my feelings about desire, embodiment, and trauma in ways I was not ready to articulate--but I didn't want to read then about the ways in which teenage girls are powerless, and I have not returned as an adult. That means I can't tell you whether Tochi Onyebuchi's novel Goliath is like Parable of the Sower in any deep and fundamental sense. But it is absolutely like the way people talk about Parable of the Sower.
If you want to read a gorgeous, literary, terrifying near-future novel about race in America--if you want to metabolize a brilliant person's take on where things are going that you may look back on, thirty years from now, to say, "Fuck they were right"--you should read Goliath.
I read Tochi Onyebuchi because I am personally and abidingly angry at the American quote-on-quote justice system in ways that middle-class white people mostly don't talk about. (Grand sweep of ideas? Yes. Background-radiation family trauma? Not so much.) This puts me in an odd position as a reviewer, because on one hand there are huge swathes of this book that are familiar in the sense of familial, and on the other hand I'm white and this book isn't for me, in ways it makes painstakingly clear.
This book is also not for Jonathan. That might be less obvious, because Jonathan is a prominent viewpoint character, especially in the early sections. Jonathan grew up on a space station, safely away from polluted, climate-crashing Earth, but he has working-class New Haven roots, and he yearns to go back. He also yearns for his boyfriend David.
Basic English-lit-class training tells you that if you're reading a book called Goliath about characters named David and Jonathan, tragedy is coming. This is perfectly true. Goliath is a tragedy in the technical sense--someday, a high school student is going to write an essay on hubris and catharsis in this novel, and when they do, I hope they get an A. But neither David nor Jonathan is the tragic hero.
At the center of Goliath are the stackers. Most of New Haven--the parts not under domes--will kill you if you're not wearing a breath mask. But the houses are still beautiful. A drone can reduce a house to its components in seconds. Then a crew of humans collects the lovely, weathered brick. It's tough, physical, satisfying work, if you don't think too hard about the symbolism.
In the space of a year, the team--Bishop, Linc, Mercedes, Bugs, Timeica, Sydney, and their colleagues--becomes a sort of family. Much of Goliath is a sort of literary collage, telling you who the stackers are, where they came from, what kinds of grief they carry, what kinds of grief are impossible to carry--and what they find that is beautiful, and what happens in the spring.
(I read this book as a NetGalley ARC, but it's now available to everyone!)
If you want to read a gorgeous, literary, terrifying near-future novel about race in America--if you want to metabolize a brilliant person's take on where things are going that you may look back on, thirty years from now, to say, "Fuck they were right"--you should read Goliath.
I read Tochi Onyebuchi because I am personally and abidingly angry at the American quote-on-quote justice system in ways that middle-class white people mostly don't talk about. (Grand sweep of ideas? Yes. Background-radiation family trauma? Not so much.) This puts me in an odd position as a reviewer, because on one hand there are huge swathes of this book that are familiar in the sense of familial, and on the other hand I'm white and this book isn't for me, in ways it makes painstakingly clear.
This book is also not for Jonathan. That might be less obvious, because Jonathan is a prominent viewpoint character, especially in the early sections. Jonathan grew up on a space station, safely away from polluted, climate-crashing Earth, but he has working-class New Haven roots, and he yearns to go back. He also yearns for his boyfriend David.
Basic English-lit-class training tells you that if you're reading a book called Goliath about characters named David and Jonathan, tragedy is coming. This is perfectly true. Goliath is a tragedy in the technical sense--someday, a high school student is going to write an essay on hubris and catharsis in this novel, and when they do, I hope they get an A. But neither David nor Jonathan is the tragic hero.
At the center of Goliath are the stackers. Most of New Haven--the parts not under domes--will kill you if you're not wearing a breath mask. But the houses are still beautiful. A drone can reduce a house to its components in seconds. Then a crew of humans collects the lovely, weathered brick. It's tough, physical, satisfying work, if you don't think too hard about the symbolism.
In the space of a year, the team--Bishop, Linc, Mercedes, Bugs, Timeica, Sydney, and their colleagues--becomes a sort of family. Much of Goliath is a sort of literary collage, telling you who the stackers are, where they came from, what kinds of grief they carry, what kinds of grief are impossible to carry--and what they find that is beautiful, and what happens in the spring.
(I read this book as a NetGalley ARC, but it's now available to everyone!)