Fifteen years ago, when Marlon James was working on his first novel, he requested an exorcism. He was in his early thirties, living in Kingston, Jamaica, working as a graphic designer and occasionally producing photo shoots for music magazines. He had attended Sunday school as a child, with his brothers, in the nearby town of Portmore, where his family lived in a neighborhood populated by doctors and civil servants. His parents worked in the police force. His mother, a sweet and stubborn woman, rose to the rank of inspector; his father, a brash but melancholy man, left the force and became a lawyer. Both were readers: his father favored Shakespeare, and his mother loved O. Henry. When James was five, other kids started calling him a sissy, and he retreated into comics and books. He liked Greek mythology because everyone in it seemed to be naked. After reading “Little House in the Big Woods,” he decided that he wanted to write. He wrote plays—one was a Jamaican revision of “Cinderella”—and he drew comics, with shape-shifting monkey men and telepathic heroes. After reading “Tom Jones,” at age twelve or thirteen, he filled a notebook that belonged to his father with diary entries in the style of Henry Fielding.
At Wolmer’s Trust High School for Boys, classmates called him Mary, and he kept a distance from his more popular older brother, to spare him embarrassment. He became friends with a girl named Ingrid, who attended Wolmer’s Trust High School for Girls, and who, like him, believed that Jamaica was too small. They talked about the new-wave and American pop records they heard on FAME FM, and together they made a sardonic and punchy zine called Rum. James began locking himself in his bedroom and tape-recording his efforts to sound masculine, repeating words like “bredren” and “boss.” Sex between men is illegal in Jamaica—the law is unenforced now but remains widely supported. Shortly before James’s eighteenth birthday, Hurricane Gilbert flattened Jamaica, leaving the island without power for months. One night, on a battery-powered radio, he heard “Sweet Child O’ Mine,” by Guns N’ Roses, for the first time. The bridge made him sob. Where do we go now? he thought, and kept thinking it for years.
At the University of the West Indies, James fell in with an arty crowd who liked college rock and hip-hop as much as he did and didn’t ask why he never dated. After graduating, he got a job as a copywriter for a Kingston ad agency. He and Ingrid made regular trips to Miami to go clubbing, and on one of those trips he went to an adult video store and bought a VHS tape called “Dreams Bi-Night.” He returned to the store on subsequent Miami visits, buying gay porn magazines and poring over them for hours, then leaving them in a hotel trash can before he flew home.
He started going to church again after another close friend, a pastor, suggested that the answer he was looking for could be found in Jesus. They said a prayer of invitation together and James considered himself born again. He joined a charismatic evangelical church in Kingston, with a mostly upscale congregation, where people spoke in tongues and services lasted for hours. James attended worship on Sundays, went to Bible study on Mondays and Wednesdays, planned church events on Thursdays, helped out with a youth group on Fridays. He did graphic-design work for the church in his spare time. He sent away for guidance about what the church discreetly termed his “struggles.” A pamphlet came in the mail, titled “Are You Gay? No Way!” It advised him to think of all the men he wanted to sleep with, and then to think of all the men he wanted to be. It was the same list, wasn’t it? Relieved, James decided that he was straight; he just had a hero-worship problem.
But he felt restless, and frustrated by the church’s anti-intellectualism. He began sneaking novels inside a leather Bible case to read during worship. One of them, Salman Rushdie’s “Shame,” an extravagant tall tale set in “not quite Pakistan” and laced with first-person authorial intrusions, rearranged his ideas about what writing could be. He wrote a scrap of an African fantasy story, set in a world ruled by eight evil spirits. Then he began writing a novel about two mysterious preachers battling for control of a fictitious Jamaican village, Gibbeah, in the nineteen-fifties. They are driven by sexual secrets, and Gibbeah is obscurely cursed: dead cows with upside-down heads wash up in the river, and the sky drips with black feathers and blood.
He titled the novel “John Crow’s Devil” and mailed it to agents and to publishers. It was rejected seventy-eight times. He told friends to delete the copies that he’d e-mailed to them, and ceremonially burned the manuscript on the balcony of his apartment. But, in 2004, he took an old copy of the first chapter to a workshop held by Calabash, a literary festival on the south coast of Jamaica that had been founded just a few years before. The workshop was taught that year by the writer Kaylie Jones, whose novel “A Soldier’s Daughter Never Cries” had been adapted by Merchant Ivory Productions. She found the chapter astonishingly assured, and asked to see the rest of the book. James located a copy of the complete manuscript in his e-mail outbox. Jones read it, and offered to edit it free of charge.
At church, James was still stuck in a cycle of temptation, transgression, confession, and redemption. He had seen other congregants receive exorcisms, and he decided that he needed one, too. The pastor called a church across town, aiming for discretion. James went there on a Tuesday morning. A man and a woman were waiting for him, in a room that was empty except for a chair and two plastic bags. He sat down and told them about his compulsive use of pornography. He didn’t say anything about being attracted to men. He confessed that he loved but didn’t like his father, who’d had four children with other women and had moved to Antigua, where he became a prosecutor. The woman asked James about his mother, and he started to bawl. He said that he doubted whether the Gospel could help him: he couldn’t accept a faith that preached joy in the morning and bullshit at night, he said. The deliverers recited Bible verses and rejected James’s lies in the name of Jesus. James, traumatized, began to vomit, eventually filling both plastic bags. Finally, he shouted, “I see two men fucking every time I close my eyes to pray.”
The deliverers cast the spirit of homosexuality out of him, and the spirit of blasphemy, and the spirit of disbelief. They told him that they heard eight demons inside him; he had the delirious thought that they were hearing the spirits that he had invented for his African fantasy story. After a while, he stopped crying, and he ordered his demons to leave. The woman held his face in her hands and told him he was free. For several months, there were no struggles. Then he turned to the pornography again. This time, he didn’t feel guilty afterward. He didn’t feel that he needed to be redeemed by Jesus. The exorcism had worked, he realized—it had just got rid of the wrong thing.
Last fall, I met James, who was about to publish his fourth novel, at the Barnes & Noble in Union Square. He is forty-eight now, and teaches creative writing at Macalester College, in St. Paul, Minnesota. He splits his time between Minneapolis and New York, where he rented an apartment, in Williamsburg, last winter. His third novel, “A Brief History of Seven Killings,” a cacophonous epic with dozens of story lines spiralling around the 1976 assassination attempt on the life of Bob Marley, won the Man Booker Prize, in 2015, and became a best-seller in paperback. It was optioned, first, by HBO, and later picked up by Amazon; Melina Matsoukas, best known for her work with Beyoncé and on the TV shows “Insecure” and “Master of None,” was attached to direct. After winning the Booker, James told an interviewer that he was going to “geek the fuck out” and write an “African Game of Thrones.” The first installment of what he calls the Dark Star trilogy, “Black Leopard, Red Wolf,” comes out in February.
James was late to our meeting, because he was on a conference call with Channel 4, in England—he’s written a pilot for the network about a former Scotland Yard detective who returns to her native Jamaica and gets entangled in a case that dredges up her past. The show has not yet been green-lighted, but James is optimistically attempting to write a part for Grace Jones, who was born one town over from Portmore and is one of his idols—a print of her “Island Life” record cover hangs behind his dinner table in Minnesota. (“I was at her birthday party a few years ago,” James told me. “She’s super sweet, and she really knows her European neo-realist cinema.”) James’s work in the music business gave him experience moving among celebrities; he is now, in a literary manner, one of them. “I was talking to Lenny Kravitz about ‘Dream on Monkey Mountain,’ the Walcott play,” he told me at one point, in the middle of a story about something else.
I found a single seat in the bookstore’s overcrowded café and read Edith Wharton’s “The Custom of the Country” while I waited. A shadow appeared on my page, accompanied by a Jamaican accent. “Aah, Undine Spragg,” James said, looming behind me. He has a deep, mellifluous voice; it sounds like a brass instrument being played sarcastically. “She’s great. But I always thought Wharton was a writer second, and a snob first.”
James, who is six feet two and muscular, has a scar between his eyebrows, a scruffy beard, and shoulder-length dreads that he often ties back in a low ponytail. He carries himself with a swagger that he dates to his first visits to New York, in 2004. Kaylie Jones had sent the manuscript of “John Crow’s Devil” to Johnny Temple, the co-founder of the indie press Akashic Books. Like all of James’s fiction, the novel is messy and incantatory, narrated with the distinctive ring of fevered speech. “Make we tell you bout the Rum Preacher,” Part One of the novel begins. James had wanted to write a “noirish, magical-realist fable” about Jamaican rural life, he told me—a story that wouldn’t idealize its pastoral setting. (No “stern grandma getting crawfish from the river,” he said.) In the book, a new preacher attempts to purge the village of sin and ends up unleashing disorder. A girl remembers a man’s “jerky balls” slapping against her naked mother; a man called the Contraptionist is struck by lightning while mounted in a machine he built to “fuck cows of any size.” The church congregation flits from religious ecstasy to near-demonic possession.
Temple loved it. “It reminded me of Faulkner, of Steinbeck, of Toni Morrison—the Old Testament strength of the imagery, this deep, rumbling, roiling heart and soul,” he told me. But one thing worried Temple, James said: the novel’s depiction of homosexuality. It’s framed as a product of abuse and a source of shame. While Temple was editing the book, he asked James for his views on the subject. James flinched at the question, assuming that Temple was asking if he was gay. “But he said, ‘I just have the worry that you’ve written a homophobic novel,’ ” James recalled. “I told him that I was writing about a homophobic society. He said, ‘Well, there’s a fine line,’ and he was right. We cut a lot of that shit out of the novel, thanks to him.” (Temple’s recollection of the exchange is fuzzy; he said that the manuscript had “maybe some homophobic elements” but that he’d always intended to publish it.)
Akashic had an office near Union Square, and, as the book was being edited, James started coming to New York for months at a time. He stayed with a younger half brother, Richard, whom he’d found out about only a few years earlier. Richard worked at UBS, in the Global Diversity division of its human- resources department, and lived in the Bronx. They spent hours talking, catching up on each other’s life.
On his first visit to the city, James took the subway to Brooklyn, expecting to emerge into something like Hemingway’s Paris. “I would stop for coffee and Paula Fox would run up and warn me to stop distracting readers with smut,” he later wrote. “Jhumpa Lahiri would explain that the reason her agent didn’t like my book was him not me. Instead, I couldn’t even get myself mugged.”
James went to the Lower East Side, where he bought a pair of ultra-low-rise Levi’s Offender jeans and walked around feeling scandalous. He revelled in downtown pleasures—record stores, anonymity—and wandered from bookstore to bookstore, amassing piles of paperbacks that he would coax a friend, who worked at an airline, to ship to Jamaica for him. At night, in a bathroom tucked away in the children’s section of the Union Square Barnes & Noble, he performed a sort of reverse-superhero transformation, stepping out of his Offenders and combat boots and into a pair of baggy jeans and sneakers, and getting on the No. 5 train to go back up to the Bronx.
We took the escalator from the café down to street level, and James pointed out the scene of these bygone makeovers. After “John Crow’s Devil” was published, in 2005, he went on a small book tour, road-tripping with a friend through the Pacific Northwest, listening to Pavement, selling one copy at a time. He felt minor. In those years, there was an active independent literary blogosphere, with Web sites like the Millions and Bookslut dissecting the publishing industry. As James began work on his second book, he created a blog of his own. He was a natural: verbose, opinionated, eager to provoke. Certain themes emerged. James felt stifled, unappreciated; the literary world was culturally myopic. His first entry, from May, 2006, picked a fight with a list that the Times had just published of the best works of American fiction from the previous twenty-five years, based on a survey of writers and critics. Morrison’s “Beloved” topped the list, but it was otherwise dominated by the work of white men. The “sheer preponderance of Caucasus Masculinus gives me pause,” James wrote. “For these are not just white male writers, but white male writers obsessed with white males, or in the case of Roth white male writers.”
James has a fondness for sweeping, contentious statements that mix deeply held convictions with spicy opinions that he’s trying on for size. He can casually dismiss the work of Philip Roth in one post and express nostalgia for the bygone era of bookish braggadocio in another. “When did we get so nerdy?” he asked in a post bemoaning the general dweebiness of the contemporary literary scene. The age of Norman Mailer had its problems, he acknowledged—alcoholism and wife-stabbing, for example—but “something about me misses that era as if I lived through it. Maybe it’s because when the writers seemed bigger than life the books seemed bigger than life as well.”
We walked through the Union Square Greenmarket, into a noisy coffee shop on Irving Place, and took a seat at a tiny corner table. James ordered green tea, and, as he poured milk into it, told me about the thrill of those early trips to New York. “It’s one thing to shape-shift in a Union Square bathroom,” he said. “It’s another thing to make friends and know that you can’t imagine them ever meeting your family. In fact, they didn’t meet, my family and my friends, until the party on Monday.”
The party was a pre-publication fête for “Black Leopard, Red Wolf,” thrown by Riverhead, the publishing house that picked up James after “John Crow’s Devil.” It took place in a Chinatown lounge whose décor matched the new book’s aesthetic: the ceiling was black, the bar glowed emerald, and strange flowers crept from the upholstery to the walls. A couple of James’s brothers had come, along with a number of friends, former students, and various people from the publishing world. (James’s mother stayed home, in Jamaica; his father died in 2012.) Earlier in the year, “Black Panther,” the Marvel movie directed by Ryan Coogler, had received sparkling reviews and earned more than a billion dollars at the global box office; the film, with its Afrofuturist spin on the superhero universe, has joined “Game of Thrones” as an inevitable reference point in the press for James’s book, which has an announced print run more than triple the size of the first printing for “Brief History.” Like “Black Panther,” “Black Leopard, Red Wolf” aims to be an event, and to counter the dominant impression of the genre it inhabits. Instead of kings with swords and flaxen-haired princesses, the novel contains pitch-skinned witches haloed in bees, and vampires that turn your blood into blue lightning, and demons that come screeching across rooftops in the dark.
For a writer who once lamented that no one would ever read his books, James’s timing is auspicious: among the sort of people who pay attention to the Booker Prize, snobbery about wizards and dragons and aliens is increasingly passé. The kind of realism that tends to predominate in literary fiction is “as fantastical as sword and sorcery,” James told me. “The world of a lot of these novels is super white, super middle-class, women only appear in a certain way. That isn’t real life! There are black people on Nantucket! We’ve given social realism this pride of place as the thing with the most verisimilitude, but there’s more verisimilitude in Aesop’s fables. Literary writers don’t get to talk down to sci-fi about invented worlds.”
A blatant preference for Caucasus Masculinus is no longer particularly fashionable, either. Sci-fi was shaped in its early years by writers, such as H. P. Lovecraft, who were obsessed with the monstrosity of the inhuman other; classic fantasy tales are full of pale European heroes on horseback striving to preserve the virgin landscape from evil forces and animalistic invaders. But there is a long counter-tradition of speculative fiction by black writers, from W. E. B. Du Bois’s 1920 apocalypse story “The Comet” through such major figures of the genre as Samuel Delany and Octavia Butler. In the nineteen-seventies, the writer Charles R. Saunders began publishing the stories that became “Imaro,” a fantasy novel set on an Africa-like continent called Nyumbani. “We have to bring some to get some in outer space and otherspace, as we have done here on Earth,” Saunders wrote, in an essay published in 2000. Fantasy and sci-fi construct imaginative versions of where we have come from and where we might be going; for Saunders and others, writing such stories with black characters is a matter of recognizing that black people have shaped the past and will play a vital part in the future.
A few years ago, as more women and people of color began winning Hugo Awards, the highest honors in speculative fiction, a group of writers launched a campaign against what they regarded as an unjust instance of “affirmative action” by the fans who annually decide the winners. But the fans ultimately rejected the reactionaries: in 2016, most of the major categories were won by women and minority writers. N. K. Jemisin, the author of the blockbuster Broken Earth trilogy, became the first black writer to win the Hugo for best novel. She went on to win the award three years in a row, which was also unprecedented. Recently, while buying a book in SoHo, I watched people hover over a new shelf labelled “Science Fiction: Neither White, Nor European.” It looked like a nursery with a cradle ready for James’s book.
A couple of weeks before we met for coffee, I went to hear James speak on a panel about diversity in sci-fi and fantasy, at New York Comic Con, a convention that annually converts the Javits Center into a maelstrom of geekery and cosplay. The audience for the panel was a mixture of black, white, and brown faces; a few rows from me, a Harley Quinn in hijab took furious notes. After a fellow-panelist, Tochi Onyebuchi, the author of a young-adult fantasy series influenced by Nigerian myth, urged the crowd to read Jemisin’s books, James joked that Jemisin would be coming for the Booker next. (He told the crowd they should also read Nalo Hopkinson, a Jamaican-born Canadian writer whose début, “Brown Girl in the Ring,” from 1998, is a dystopian horror-fantasy story animated by the West African spirit-magic tradition of Obeah.) Even as condescension toward genre fiction has gone out of style, the universes of literary and speculative fiction remain distinct, with their own awards, their own publishers, and their own separate, albeit overlapping, communities of readers. “There are a lot of literary-fiction authors whose heads are super stuck up their asses,” James said, telling the attendees that writers ought to read widely across genres.
Several years ago, after a frustrating argument with a friend about the all-white cast of “The Hobbit,” James had an impulse “to reclaim all the stuff I like—court intrigue, monsters, magic,” he told me. “I wanted black pageantry. I wanted just one novel where someone like me is in it, and I don’t have to look like I just walked out of H. P. Lovecraft, with a bone in my hair, and my lips are bigger than my eyes, and I’m saying some shit like ‘Oonga boonga boonga.’ Or else I’m some fucker named Gagool and I’m thwarting you as you get the diamonds.” Though James is well versed in the recent flourishing of speculative fiction from the African diaspora, he still sometimes talks about the Dark Star trilogy as though there were nothing comparable in the world—partly because when he first dreamed up the project, several years ago, it felt truly oppositional, and partly, perhaps, because he still has a tendency to see himself as an embattled rebel, even as the world has begun to celebrate him. He wanted to write a black fantasy novel that would succeed with a literary audience, too, the way that Susanna Clarke’s “Jonathan Strange & Mr. Norrell” had, in 2004, winning a Hugo and getting longlisted for the Booker. “So I did as Toni Morrison said, and I decided I would write the novel I wanted to read,” he told me.
For two years, he researched African history and mythology, constructing the foundation for a fantastical vision of the continent that would invert the monolithic “Africa” invented by the West. He drew on oral epics, like the Epic of Sundiata, which some people believe was the basis for “The Lion King,” though the filmmakers have called it an “original story,” while admitting some parallels with Shakespeare. (“I felt like these stories had been stolen from me,” James said at Comic Con. “People say that ‘The Lion King’ is based on ‘Hamlet.’ Please.”) He read legendary monster tales, like those about the Inkanyamba, a South African serpent with a horse’s head, who causes summer storms. He made notes on the grammar of African languages, to inflect the book’s prose. He briefly considered doing a historical series, an “Ethiopian ‘Wolf Hall,’ ” but then reverted to his dream of writing fantasy that honored the African diaspora. He wanted to build a “vast playground of myth and history and legend that other people can draw from, a pool that’s as rich as Viking or Celtic lore,” he said.
He sketched his new world’s geography. (The maps that appear in the book are his work.) He made a list of characters that kept getting longer. There would be a quest to find a boy, he decided, and a motley group of seekers: a Moon Witch, a mournful giant, a perceptive buffalo. He wondered if the Aesi—a man with “skin like tar, hair red, when you see him you hear the flutter of black wings”—ought to narrate the story. Then he started thinking about a character called Tracker, a hunter with a nose that can suss out the details of a man’s life in an instant—the spices in his kitchen, the last time he washed—and track a woman to another city with just a whiff of her shirt. Tracker would be sullen and resentful, reserving his gentleness for a group of deformed children, called mingi, whom he meets through an “anti-witch” called the Sangoma.
James took a yearlong sabbatical from Macalester to work on the book. But when the sabbatical was nearing its end, in the summer of 2016, he had ten Moleskines of notes and no story structure. One day he was talking with Melina Matsoukas, and she mentioned the Showtime series “The Affair,” which shifts perspectives, “Rashomon” style, allowing its characters’ versions of events to diverge. The school year was about to start, but James knew that this was the solution. Before the fall semester had ended, he’d written the first hundred pages.
James began teaching at Macalester in 2007. After “John Crow’s Devil” was published, he attended a low-residency M.F.A. program at Wilkes University, in Pennsylvania, at the suggestion of Kaylie Jones. He knew that a degree could open the door to a teaching job in the United States. “If you are a writer in Jamaica, maybe even in the Caribbean, there comes a point when you just have to go,” he wrote on his blog, a month after moving to Minnesota. He added, “I love my country but I’ve never missed it, perhaps because I have never forgotten the reasons I left.”
In early November, I flew out to Minnesota. The landscape on the drive from the airport to campus was colorless and frozen. It spooked James when he first arrived. He had a hundred dollars in his pocket, and he knew almost no one; he spent almost a month living off pita chips and hummus. Finally, he called Ingrid, who now works as a digital-media consultant and is still his best friend. (“I always knew he was a writer,” she told me recently. “And I always knew he was gay.”) He asked her to Western Union him some cash from Kingston.
In his first semester, James taught a fiction workshop and a class on the literature of 9/11: Claire Messud’s “The Emperor’s Children,” which he loves; John Updike’s “Terrorist,” which he thinks is awful; Deborah Eisenberg’s story “Twilight of the Superheroes,” which he regards as the best work of fiction about the attacks. When I visited, he was teaching a nonfiction workshop. On a Thursday afternoon, his classroom was dim; late-fall sunlight cast slanting shadows. James, in patchwork jeans and a denim oxford, commanded the room with a generous attention that took a variety of forms, depending on the student who was receiving it: gentleness, prodding, bemused sarcasm. “Don’t assume that everyone knows what a hotep is,” he told a student who had written about an encounter at a barbershop with an exemplar of the type, a man whose Afrocentrism was mixed with regressive sanctimony. “Hoteps are pro-black but anti-progress,” James explained to the class. “They’re stunningly sexist. Your favorite rapper is probably a hotep. He also might be gay. When I used to work in the industry, I got monthly updates on who’s gay. But I’m not gonna tell you!”
James is a proponent of M.F.A. programs as a source of literary community—he has encouraged many of his students to apply—but he is baleful about “M.F.A. fiction,” which often falls within the realm of domestic realism that he loathes. “We did a job search at Macalester and I could identify the program writers had gone to by their writing samples,” he told me. “There’s so much attention to correctness. There’s too narrow a view of what constitutes a story, and how it should be told.”
When it comes to feedback on his own work, James is headstrong and malleable by turns. He resents many forms of editorial imposition, nursing cherished grudges against the people who, for instance, told him that “John Crow’s Devil” was too foreign for American readers. (Its style is legitimately formidable, and not always successful—I would recommend it only to people who also enjoy, say, the very early work of Cormac McCarthy.) But, if someone offers an astute correction, he never forgets it. For most of his career, he’s been working off a note that the Trinidadian novelist Elizabeth Nunez gave him at a Calabash workshop in 2002. “She told me that I was talented, but that I didn’t know how to write women,” he said. “I didn’t know how women related to each other, how they processed the unthinkable.” He reread Iris Murdoch, Alice Walker, and Muriel Spark, and concluded that Nunez was right.
As if accepting a challenge, he set his second novel entirely in the world of the feminine unthinkable. “The Book of Night Women” tells the story of six enslaved half sisters living on a sugarcane plantation in the late eighteenth century who plot a rebellion against the overseer who fathered them. James had wanted to write about the impossibly brutal and volatile period in Jamaica when enslaved Africans outnumbered their white owners by more than ten to one. “The Book of Night Women” is full of rage, and a terrible beauty; in the Times, the scholar Kaiama L. Glover compared it to the work of Morrison and Walker. She also noted that much of the book is, “understandably, very difficult to read.” It is written entirely in eighteenth-century patois, and teems with intimate agony, from an attempted rape and subsequent murder early on to a series of mass executions at the novel’s end. “I think violence should be violent,” James told one interviewer. There is nothing “tasteful or beautifully written or wonderfully wrought” about violence in real life. Sure, he admitted, explicit violence and sex can quickly turn pornographic. “So what?” he said. “Risk pornography. Risk it.”
In his office at Macalester, beneath a poster of David Bowie, James told me that he’d actually considered “The Book of Night Women” a commercial work. It had a mesmerizing protagonist—the violent, green-eyed Lilith—and, with the ticking clock of the rebellion, a tight, cinematic hook of a plot. He’d written the first draft in the third person, through the eyes of a British magistrate. “I really tried to get my Jane Austen on!” he said.
I remembered a story he’d told me—one of his favorite grudges—about his attempts to get the book published. An editor at Viking UK had suggested that he rewrite the book in Standard English. “You hated that suggestion,” I said. “But Standard English was actually the first thing you tried.”
“Of course!” he said. “People gotta eat! I’ve been trying to sell out for years!”
He pulled up a file on his computer and showed me the old draft. The writing was classical and polished. It also felt tedious and stilted. As James worked on the book, Lilith’s dialogue gradually took over; he trashed the draft and began again, starting the book with her. The result might still be his best novel. As with the rest of his work, the strength of the book lies in the knowledge of power that is exclusive to the powerless, and in the unexpected, even unclassifiable ways in which his protagonists navigate the systems they’ve been forced to live within. Lilith, proud and selfish, distances herself from her half sisters, and thrills to private visions of revenge and divine apocalypse, imagining that “true womanness was to be free to be as terrible as you wish.”
In 1965, Chinua Achebe wrote about a boy in his wife’s English classroom, in Nigeria, who was so afraid of being called a bushman that he wrote about winter when he meant the harmattan, a windy season in West Africa. “How can this great blasphemy be purged?” Achebe asked. It was part of his work, as a writer, to “teach that boy that there is nothing disgraceful about the African weather, that the palm tree is a fit subject for poetry.” The dilemma was that of using the colonizer’s language to represent the post-colonial world. Derek Walcott wrote, in 1980, “It’s good that everything’s gone, except their language, / Which is everything.” James feels himself to be in a dialogue with Caribbean writers—including Walcott and V. S. Naipaul—who simultaneously mastered and wrestled with the colonial English that they were taught as kids. But he is, he has said, “post-post-colonial.” While an earlier generation of writers defined themselves against British imperialism, the “hovering power” for James was the United States. He sees this orientation as typical of younger diasporic writers, such as the Nigerian novelist Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, whose best-selling “Americanah,” from 2013, James credits with changing attitudes, in the publishing industry, toward novels by and about people of color. The Caribbean has given him “these huge buffets of language, which I have every right to use and to not use,” he said.
“A Brief History of Seven Killings” is James’s most virtuosic verbal performance: it is prefaced with a cast list of seventy-six characters, and employs almost as many first-person voices. There’s Dr. Arthur Jennings, the dead politician whose narration jump-starts the story; Nina, a nihilistic receptionist; Dr. Love, a Medellín operative trained by the C.I.A.; Bam-Bam, a baby gangbanger; John-John, a gay hit man; Josey Wales, the tricky, perceptive enforcer who flubs the Marley assassination but then ascends to the top of a transnational drug syndicate. The story begins a decade and a half after Jamaica attained independence; Marley had brought global attention to the island’s music, and the Rolling Stones had come to Kingston to record “Goats Head Soup.” On the street, the People’s National Party, led by the reformist Prime Minister Michael Manley, was at war with the conservative Jamaica Labour Party. James was in elementary school at the time. His neighborhood in Portmore was so peaceful it was boring, he told me, but he had to be careful walking around certain areas in Kingston, where he went to school. When Marley was shot, the event reverberated. “I knew my parents were scared, even if I couldn’t understand why,” James has said. “There was a sense that anything could happen.”
The novel is as emphatic a statement of literary ambition as you’ll find in contemporary fiction. Its scope is Dickensian—it’s a kaleidoscopic, coke-spiked “Our Mutual Friend”—and, in the demands it makes on the reader, it calls to mind postmodern doorstops like “Gravity’s Rainbow” and “Infinite Jest.” James’s gifts as a writer—his theatrical unrepentance, and his unbiddable style—can double as obstacles: “Brief History” is both exhausting and exhilarating, sometimes simultaneously. (There’s a thread on Reddit, from 2015, headlined “I need some help following A Brief History of Seven Killings.” The top reply begins, “My advice would be to relax when it comes to trying to keep close tabs on all the plot links in this one.”) When it won the Booker Prize, James told me, he was astonished. His money had been on “A Little Life,” Hanya Yanagihara’s bildungsroman-cum-trauma-opera set in contemporary New York.
A few months before the prize ceremony, James published an essay in the Times Magazine titled “From Jamaica to Minnesota to Myself,” in which he came out publicly for the first time. He’d got there by steps: during his M.F.A. program, he’d told a classmate, over MSN Messenger, that he was gay; in Minnesota, he’d gradually settled into his identity, letting people assume his sexuality. He joined Tinder and Grindr. (No one recognized his photo on either app, he said, apart from the man who sent him a message telling him to stop catfishing strangers by pretending to be Marlon James.) But he had never spoken to his family about his sexuality. The week before the piece was published, James had dinner in New York with Richard, and reconciled himself, while they were eating, to the possibility that they would never have dinner again.
But there was no rift between them. James’s brothers—he has seven brothers and sisters, four of them half siblings, though James speaks of them all simply as siblings—had discussed the possibility that James was gay, Richard told me, speaking on the phone from a barbershop, above the metallic hum of clippers. “The thing is, we all love women a lot,” Richard said. “And I’d never seen him with a partner, period. He was always in his work. It was a good excuse.”
The family is tightly knit, Richard told me—“When all the brothers get in a room and talk, you don’t know who’s talking; we all sound like each other,” he said. I asked Richard if he ever wished that James had been able to come out to him earlier. “We’re in a very masculine culture,” he replied. “And even within our family the men are very masculine.” He added, “For me, it never mattered.”
Richard described their father as a larger-than-life figure who had a “gift with words” and a “capacity for reinventing himself.” (“I think we all have it, too,” he said.) James told me that his father’s death changed his sense of what was possible. “When you’re in a Jamaican or African or Arab closet—you love your parents, but in some ways you feel like you can’t be free until they die,” he said. James and his mother have never spoken directly about the essay, but she texts him all day long on WhatsApp, speaking a maternal lingua franca of viral videos and Christian memes. All of the siblings are on a separate WhatsApp chat together; at one point, James showed me a stream of texts about the Powerball jackpot—everyone had bought tickets but him. Have they ever won any lotto money? “Of course not,” he said. “No one’s won shit!”
On my second night in Minneapolis, an icy layer of snow settled on I-94. James does not have a driver’s license, and so I drove us, very slowly, to a bar in St. Paul, where Jake Shears, the former lead singer of Scissor Sisters, was playing a solo show. James had met Shears earlier in the year, at a literary festival. James was wearing a long black tunic, slit up to the thigh, and combat boots.
James is increasingly comfortable in Minnesota. (During my visit, I said that I’d heard he was a great host, and he quickly pulled together a thoughtful dinner party for six, grinding spices for chicken curry and drizzling Egyptian molasses on roasted carrots.) He has also written with bitter eloquence about the racism he has encountered in his adopted home. After Philando Castile, an employee at a St. Paul Montessori school, was shot and killed by a police officer during a traffic stop, in 2016, James wrote on Facebook about riding his bike on dark roads rather than on well-lit streets where officers might be looking for someone who fits a description. “Do I kneel and get shot?” he asked. “Do I reach for my ID and get shot? Do I say I’m an English teacher and get shot? Do I tell them everything I am about to do, and get shot? Do I assume that seven of them will still feel threatened by one of me, and get shot? Do I simply stand and be big black guy and get shot?” This fear has intruded on some of his happiest moments, like the night he went out to Paisley Park with a bunch of colleagues and friends to try to catch a glimpse of Prince, and ended up shouting, “It’s O.K.! We’re English teachers!” as security headlights shined in his face.
At the bar, there was a hand-lettered sign atop a little table that read “Reserved for Marlon James.” “I should have worn tights underneath this dress,” James said, as we sat down. For the first time since I’d met him, he seemed unsure of himself. “I don’t recognize anyone here,” he said, looking around. The room was full of white guys wearing Queens of the Stone Age hoodies and baseball hats bearing the logo of the Minnesota Vikings—men who, in New York, might have appeared to be straight dads coming from a cookout. “The gay community in Minneapolis is very insular,” he said. “It’s isolating. I’ve never been on the inside. I’ve been here for eleven years and only dated one person. And then I got my place in New York this winter, and within four months I was dating this guy.”
James was headed back to New York the next morning to see the new boyfriend, a blond James Baldwin scholar in his early forties who teaches in Manhattan and had spent the past few months in the South of France, on a fellowship. Talking to James about the relationship, I sometimes felt like an aunt being nosy with my bashful, college-age nephew—I was conscious of the contrast between the sweet shyness with which he spoke about romantic matters and the gleeful profanity of his work. James disdains the way sex is often written in literary fiction, with timidity and avoidance dressed up as discretion. (He terms this “space-break sex.”) “Some writers make you think that the carnal world doesn’t matter,” he said. “But people exist in space, people smell, people’s voices carry sound and power. Our bodies tell people things. Our bodies are telling us things.”
At the bar, James grooved in his seat, plucking out musical references in Shears’s set: a bass line that evoked the Bee Gees here, a slide guitar that sounded like Roxy Music there. Shears closed the set by talking about the midterms and singing “Tomorrow,” from “Annie.” In a full-throated glam roar, it was resplendent, and I wondered aloud why Queen never covered the song. “Because Freddie didn’t want to out himself!” James said.
Backstage, Shears embraced James and demanded a copy of “Black Leopard.” As we were leaving, James glanced at the “Reserved for Marlon James” sign on our table. “I kind of want to steal it,” he said. I put it in my purse, imagining it sitting on a shelf in his apartment, next to the Grace Jones poster and a fat stack of foreign translations of “Brief History,” all of it proof of the person he is still writing into existence.
I read an early galley of “Black Leopard, Red Wolf” late last summer. When I saw James at Comic Con, in the fall, he told me that I had to read the new version—he’d been revising. “It was kind of sexist,” he explained. Tracker was always ranting about witches; he hated his mother for hiding a traumatic family secret about something she couldn’t control. “No one was calling Tracker out on the things he said about women. I think this new draft is much more feminist.”
When I read the final galley, I noticed the changes, which were not particularly subtle. (“Maybe you bear hatred for women,” a character tells Tracker. “I’ve never heard you speak good of a single one. They all seem to be witches in your world.”) But I hadn’t thought that the earlier draft was sexist. James’s male characters are frequently disrespectful toward women: they’re preachers, gangsters, overseers. But his fiction treats masculinity flexibly, and explores it as a wide, complex spectrum. James doesn’t manifest a defensive sense of libidinal apology in his work, as any number of straight white writers tend to do. Nor does he work within and against a specific hyper-masculine tradition, as writers like Junot Díaz have done. In “Black Leopard,” Tracker is hostile and slippery and sensitive and chauvinistic at once. He describes shoga men—a Swahili term that denotes queerness—as men who “found inside ourselves another woman that cannot be cut out. No, not a woman, something that the gods forgot they made, or forgot to tell men, maybe for the best.”
“Black Leopard” delivers some genre-specific satisfactions: the fight scenes are choreographed with comic-book wit; a futuristic city, seemingly weightless, rises past clouds and toward the moon; giraffes the size of house cats flee a rhino-size warthog; a corrupt merchant who deals in “white science” grows a wife and child out of body parts and branches. But it deliberately upends others. When I first saw the news that James was writing a fantasy trilogy, I had assumed that, after reaching the pinnacle of critical acclaim, with the Booker, he was pivoting to the land of the straightforward best-seller. I figured that the double hurdle posed by entering a genre and overturning that genre’s dominant history would be complication enough, and that he would produce a book with practical, even perfunctory, language, and an accessible, satisfying plot.
Instead, he’d written not just an African fantasy novel but an African fantasy novel that is literary and labyrinthine to an almost combative degree. It is a quest story that opens with an announcement that the quest has failed: “The child is dead. There is nothing left to know.” Drawing on the tradition of Anansi stories, folktales that end with a disclaimer that nothing can be taken at face value, James suffuses the novel with doubt and misdirection. Tracker has searched for the child; he is held captive and interrogated by a faceless inquisitor, who notes that Tracker’s “account continues to perplex even those of uncommon mind.” It is one of many moments in which James seems to wink at the reader, acknowledging the circuitousness and opacity of his story, in which basic narrative conventions are consistently questioned and often disowned. “There is no straight line between us and this boy, only streams leading to streams, leading to streams, leading to streams, and sometimes—tell me if I lie—you get so lost in the stream that the boy fades, and with him the reason you search for him,” one character tells Tracker.
James speaks persuasively about the intellectual purpose of refusing certainty and straightforwardness—he is a very persuasive person in general—but I found, as I read the book, that I often felt adrift in the stream. To an even greater extent than in “Brief History,” James asks the reader to trust that the pieces don’t need to come together. There are no clear morals, no simple good-and-evil conflicts, no bright lines of destiny or teleology. Nearly every bit of dialogue is immediately challenged by another character. “The series is three different versions of the same story, and I’m not going to tell people which they should believe,” James said.
I had gone to see him in Williamsburg. Like his place in Minneapolis and his Macalester office, his Brooklyn apartment is crowded but immaculate, an oasis of rock posters and art prints and fiddlehead ferns. Books were everywhere—folktales and memoirs and novels, all covered in laminated plastic, as if in a library. James, who is applying for U.S. citizenship, also keeps an office in Park Slope, in an eclectic writers’ clubhouse owned by the novelist John Wray, which New York described as “a cross between an artists’ colony, a co-working space, and a frat house.” James is notorious for never turning out the light in the bathroom. It’s not Hemingway’s Paris, but it serves its purpose.
It was a rainy night shortly before Christmas, and James was recovering from surgery on a torn meniscus—an old biking injury had caught up to him, he suspected. A photographer from Interview was just leaving when I arrived. James’s boyfriend was in town but was laid up with a cold, so he couldn’t hang out or come take care of him. “I thought this was what the boyfriend thing was about,” he said dryly.
After the book party in New York, Entertainment Weekly threw him another, in Los Angeles. He has received inquiries about adapting “Black Leopard, Red Wolf,” and there’s renewed interest in “The Book of Night Women.” James told me that HBO ultimately passed on “Brief History,” because network executives thought there wouldn’t be enough of an audience; later, I joked about how the network’s adaptation would have centered on the book’s white Rolling Stone journalist and its white C.I.A. agent. “As a matter of fact, that’s pretty much what it was,” he said. HBO disputed this characterization, explaining, in a statement, that “adapting this complex novel for television proved to be very challenging.”
James is aware of the possibility that the new book will be, as editors have suggested, “too sci-fi for the literary crowd and too literary for the sci-fi crowd.” Early in each book’s writing process, he told me, he aims to do something conventional. “There’s still a white Anglo-Saxon Protestant realistic novelist buried inside me, who thinks I should write a stringent third-person narrative, because that’s what real writers do,” he said. Then he ends up writing a whole novel in a virtuosic patois, conjured out of slavery’s erasures, or giving his novel seventy different first-person narrators, one of whom is a ghost. With “Black Leopard,” he tried a lofty, “tale-speaking” narration, which stabilized the book with a traditional sense of authority. (In “Lord of the Rings,” you never doubt the story you’re told.) “But ancient Africa didn’t need that kind of story,” he said. “The African folktale is not your refuge from skepticism. It is not here to make things easy for you, to give you faith so you don’t have to think.”
I thought of a story that Johnny Temple had told me, about launching “John Crow’s Devil” in Jamaica. “Marlon says, ‘O.K., this is a family audience, so I won’t read any of the dark parts,’ and then he reads from the book, and it’s insanely, just insanely, dark,” Temple said. “This is one of the things that’s always fascinated me about him. I don’t know that he always realizes how inventive he is, or how subversive. I think, in his mind, he’s always written this highly commercial thing.”
Given James’s dramatic personal history, and his talent for recounting it, his decision to avoid autobiography in his fiction is striking. “I’m going to write the Jamaican middle-class novel,” he said at one point. “I thought you didn’t like that sort of thing,” I replied. “Yeah, I don’t,” he said. “I don’t know why I said that. I’m not going to write it. I just want to de-exoticize Jamaica. But I have no interest in this forensic attitude to everyday life in literary fiction. I have no interest in writing about the situation I’m in.”
Throughout our conversations, James would resist and then draw closer to the idea that his personal life was legible in his novels at all—he called the suggestion “pop psychology” whenever it came up. I asked him about the spiritual question that reverberates through “Black Leopard,” whose world is thickly enchanted but whose characters don’t really believe in anything; this is one of the challenges the book poses to its genre’s metaphysics. “I do think I am still in the middle of a religious crisis,” he said. “I’m too much of a wuss to become a complete atheist. Tracker is like me—losing belief in belief. I always give these characters my stakes.”
During the interrogation that opens the book, Tracker, rather than tell the story of the failed quest, starts by telling the story of his life. Because of the strength of his nose and his attendant ability to intuit people’s lives and motivations, he has become cynical. He insists, repeatedly, that he believes in nothing, that he wants nothing, that “nobody loves no one.” The phrase is repeated throughout the novel, and, with its double meaning, it functions like a koan. Nobody really loves no one, not even Tracker: he grows to love a man named Mossi, as well as the deformed children, the mingi, whom the two of them end up caring for.
Tracker’s arc is hardly a love story, but it does mark the first time that mutual love has appeared in James’s work. “I think I tend to write circumstances in which love is impossible,” James told me. In “The Book of Night Women,” Lilith briefly lives with an Irish overseer. She understands that love isn’t possible between them, and yet she loves him. He believes that he’s genuinely in love with her, but he’s wrong. Tracker does not know that he’s changing. It’s an old griot who describes how Tracker, whom he calls Wolf Eye, behaves when he’s in love. He tells a story, in song, about spying on Tracker and Mossi as they play with the children. “Did the gods curse me and make me a mother?” Tracker asks. “No he blessed me and made you my wife,” Mossi says. “And the children laugh, and the Wolf Eye scowl / And scowl, and scowl, and scowl into a laugh. I was there, I see it,” the griot sings. ♦
