I found Udozinma Iweala's neck-snapping new novel "Speak No Evil" (Harper) a welcome palate-cleanser after the tooth-rotting peachiness of "Call Me by Your Name" (the movie, which a friend brilliantly categorized as bi-curious, not gay) and what I've heard about "Love Simon." The latter may actually have a run in Bangkok because teenagers run the place, cute gay boys are collected like bracelet charms (when not drowned back home in their villages), and teenagers flood the theaters as places to make out. If it does, I won't be there. The single greatest aural horror in my personal theater is the sound of other people's sex, which I hear won't be coming from the screen. But I digress.
But so does Iweala's novel. "Speak No Evil" murmurs "It Gets Better" repeatedly while piling on the evidence that it doesn't. It walks right up to its core message, averts its eyes, and ours, and goes verbally both exhibitionist and escapist. This Houdini-like writing is problematic and confusing in too many ways to catalog, though it does occasionally achieve liftoff. The great stuff is concentrated in the far too few chapters in which the father of the protagonist, 18-year-old Niru, hauls his son back to Nigeria (the family "home," if actually only for "Daddy"), for some old-fashioned ex-gay therapy by practiced Christian zealots.
The wave of extraordinary fiction by English-writing Nigerian expats keeps on cresting, sweeping me elatedly along with it. I've read none better at depicting Nigeria with present-day Western eyes than Nigerian-American Iweala's. Open to those chapters, and the paper becomes sweat-stained before your very eyes, discolored by the all-encompassing filth, stench, poverty and pollution.
Iweala proved himself as a writer with "Beasts of No Nation," which was made into a must-see if hard-to-watch movie. As we read, we hoped Iweala, who has apparently tarried over "Speak No Evil," has not snapped into gear in time to hook another Hollywood option.
You don't have to have survived Gerard Conroy's cauterizing memoir "Boy Erased" (soon to be a movie I may have to travel to see, and will) to be horrified by Niru's torturous degradation in a remote, guarded Nigerian country church that looks "like a factory" from the outside.
The grim ritual feels like it's just getting going when the chapter ends. It doesn't take a prurient sensibility to feel cheated when, turning the page, a new chapter begins, father and son are back home in suburban D.C., and, at the first chapter break, the story resumes with the word Meredith, "beer in her hand."
We met Meredith earlier and, cringe though we did, she's what could be called only a looming presence until she finally takes over the last third of the book, in her own dizzying, self-obsessed voice - just as she previously had ghost-written Niru's life trajectory. If you have any kind of a TV life, you know this girl, a meddling Jane Austen character on overdrive.
In a scene out of a CNN sex-worker interview about our Commander-in-Chief, this needless-to-say white girl Niru considers his best friend lures him into her bedroom when her parents are away and, soon naked and inviting, tries to research that thing they say about black boys' penises.
It's hardly that Meredith's doomed-to-fail sexual aggression is unrealistic; it's phantasmagorically realistic, and you try in vain to put it out of your mind (the too-little-discussed downside of good writing). What's most believable about it is that, upon Niru's performance failure - and his first-ever revelation that he thinks he's gay - she turns, with the agility of a ballerina (they're both runners, in every sense), to say, No prob. She'll be his BFF, especially given the rejuvenated confidentiality of their relationship.
The mayhem ensues immediately. It does not get better. To say she outs him is to grossly misreport the calumny of her bratty, politically-correct-wannabe actions to help.
By the time she takes over the narrative she has, in limited ways, moved on. She obsesses on that last day of high school when another of her obstreperous actions ended in Niru's bleeding out in an alley (at the moment, she recalls a veteran's classroom lecture about the speed of it), which lands her in the whited-out middle of a police shooting turned D.C. protest.
In a peak moment of high internal drama, Iweala has her say, "I shouldn't have pushed him, I sniffle." Of her new boyfriend she drily observes, "In his most frustrated moments, [he] says I think of myself too much."
I'm assuming providing only dreamy descriptions of pivotal events is as deliberate on Iweala's part as trendily leaving out quotation marks, which accomplishes little but prolonging read-over time. Whether you should read "Speak No Evil" depends wholly on your priorities now that John Bolton is National Security Adviser.