If I Survive You
A major debut, blazing with style and heart, that follows a Jamaican family striving for more in Miami, and introduces a generational storyteller.
In the 1970s, Topper and Sanya flee to Miami as political violence consumes their native Kingston. But America, as the couple and their two children learn, is far from the promised land. Excluded from society as Black immigrants, the family pushes on through Hurricane Andrew and later the 2008 recession, living in a house so cursed that the pet fish launches itself out of its own tank rather than stay. But even as things fall apart, the family remains motivated, often to its own detriment, by what the younger son, Trelawny, calls “the exquisite, racking compulsion to survive.”
Masterfully constructed with heart and humor, the linked stories in Jonathan Escoffery’s If I Survive You center on Trelawny as he struggles to carve out a place for himself amid financial disaster, racism, and flat-out bad luck. After a fight with Topper, Trelawny claws his way out of homelessness through a series of odd, often hilarious jobs. Meanwhile, his brother, Delano, attempts a disastrous cash grab to get his kids back, and his cousin Cukie looks for a father who doesn’t want to be found. As each character searches for a foothold, they never forget the profound danger of climbing without a safety net.
Pulsing with vibrant lyricism and inimitable style, sly commentary and contagious laughter, Escoffery’s debut unravels what it means to be in between homes and cultures in a world at the mercy of capitalism and whiteness. With If I Survive You, Escoffery announces himself as a prodigious storyteller in a class of his own, a chronicler of American life at its most gruesome and hopeful.
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Community Reviews
What’s it about?
This series of interrelated stories explores the experience of a family arriving from Jamaica to Miami in the 1970’s. Most of the stories center around the youngest son Trelawny, who does what he can to survive and thrive. As the family lives through Hurricane Andrew, and then the 2008 recession, we see how those living on the margins are hit hard by any extra or unseen problems.
What did it make me think about?
Can’t these people catch a break?
Should I read it?
Jonathan Escoffery is a very talented new voice in fiction. This story aptly describes how difficult it is for so many people to move out of their circumstances. It also reiterates how incredibly obsessed America is over racial identity. The character of Trelawny will both frustrate you and impress you. For me this book was more impactful than beloved. The character’s lives had so little hope- but I suppose that is the point….
Quote-
“Just weeks before I came home from college last year, my mother said to hell with Miami, with this whole damn country- the rat race, all of it- let the bank foreclose on her house, and dipped back to Jamaica. She says she can finally breathe now. She feels freed by the privilege of relative racelessness. In 2009, Kingston’s murder rate reached the highest per on record, and may mom returned there so she could finally feel safe.”
The book touts a review from Ann Patchett and she says... "reads like fiction written at the highest level." I didn't think anything of that quote when I first saw it but after reading If I Survive You, I agree. This book had a comfortable flow within each short story, but I did not love the overall fact this novel was made up of them. It felt like someone telling a story but there was an intelligence behind it that pushed it past the point of "mind candy" (an easy to read book on the beach) to a true fictional tale of race and life in America.
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