It's a wonder Black Deutschland got out of the barn. A book that had everything going for it �" who in its imagined target audience would not want to read about the experience of a black gay American man in Berlin just before the fall of the Wall? �" Darryl Pinckney's mess of a new novel (Farrar, Straus and Giroux), his second, emerges as a book proposal posing as a book, a long query letter artfully postponing the work of writing, an inauspicious beginning to Black History Month.
To the extent that it's the writer's job to do the work, to make the reader's job easier (a debatable point, I grant), Pinckney, like his protagonist Jed Goodfinch, has reneged on his assignment. Jed �" on first sighting a recovering alcoholic and addict, a promising subplot dropped into the blender like a raw potato �" has "left Chicago behind for good. I was inordinately proud of my one-way ticket. I'd become the person I so admired, the black American expatriate. I came back to West Berlin ready for adult life, willing to register with the police." He eventually takes an ill-defined (and, it will turn out, ill-executed) job with a tony architectural design firm of considerable pretension and questionable achievement.
At first you want to praise the book's fluid handling of time, but in no time at all you don't know what time it is or where you are, and, such as it matters, whether Jed is still clean and sober. The plot, again like the protagonist, lurches back and forth between Berlin and Chicago, the latter being the city more richly evoked. Early on, Jed's Chicago cousin Ruthanne (in Berlin, a pianist unhelpfully nicknamed Cello) shows promise as an important, well-drawn character. But by the time the Wall falls in the novel's final pages, the only characters you're likely to go on thinking about are Jed's parents. As they are introduced, back in Chicago, back then, "In every room of the house, a clinic of the self was in progress. Mom was a missionary and we, her children, were an indigenous people."
This is good writing until it becomes just another, pesky obstacle to knowing what's going on. Pinckney's got a way with words, a turn of phrase, that makes a sentence eye- or ear-catching. If only each clever sentence didn't feel like the book starting over. The novel is long on surface incident that doesn't add up to much. The last slack I tried to cut the novel was that it was picaresque, except that it wasn't episodic so much as rambling, and the protagonist wasn't picaro enough.
The boat the book most grievously misses is the AIDS novel, of which it might have been a fine exemplar. I was in Germany, though not Berlin, at the time the Wall fell, and gay men were suffocating if not with, then from, AIDS and its dire implications for continuing sexual liberation. This was a country in which gay men had, in living memory, been sent to death camps. But the virus of Schwulesburg and its discontents are little more than lurking menaces in this only intermittently frightening cyclone of a story.
What little sex is mentioned is, perhaps gratefully, not depicted. The reader's hope springs up one last time when a boyfriend appears on the scene: Duallo, a lithe 19-year-old black man from Cameroon with ambitions to be a singer and a fascination with black American music. He's tremendously exciting until Jed describes him in Jed's terms. "He smelled like Aunt Loretta's cold cream in her dish in front of the mirror on her tiny vanity table as it was in 1966." When we desperately want to know more �" everything �" about Duallo, we get a sorry saga of adolescent masturbation.
"I couldn't tell if I was really in love or if I was just relieved to have someone, to have joined the living." Still: "I was in my grove, my bed, and Duallo was in my arms again. I kissed him and, incredibly, he was still the someone kissing me back." As for sex, the most vivid evocation is this: "It was never less than wondrous that he consented. I'd just pulled off the condom, making it snap, when they knocked." This particular "they" is not the people informing him of his father's heart attack back in Chicago, before the fall of the Wall the book's biggest incident.
You gasp at some of Jed's observations about life in Berlin. "I got hung up over the question of laundry." For real? Is that even a sentence? Has the editor nodded off? The writing verges on the atmospheric in its depiction of Berliners dancing on the tumbling Wall and reverse-christening it with champagne. "West Berlin had been up all night, crying, honking." But the book's final paragraphs drag us back, anticlimactically, to Isherwood's Berlin of a half-century previous.
Pinckney knows his way around the English language, which has its rules, rather strict ones, about adjective order. The fact that, when his story is told, you don't know whether Jed's really a black gay man or a gay black man is a problem. He never settles on his exact skin color. It's shocking to consider the opportunities Pinckney squanders telling his story through the bleary eyes of his antihero. What might have been a compelling slice of history is reduced to bar talk.