At first I thought the book was sophomoric: not even YA level, maybe middle school or junior high... I wanted to like it, so I tried to make excuses for it. This might be old news to me, but maybe fictionalizing the (real) incentives of race-baiting would widen the audience, bring new people into the conversation. And there was a point where it seemed it might be less like CRT for Dummies, and more like the journey of a psychopath's self-delusion. But the author failed on so many fronts.
The character could have simply been unlikable - that would have opened him up to numerous possibilities (he could have gone full psycho and increased his threats to his challengers, he could have manipulated his suicide attempt to force his redemption, he could have been an unreliable narrator and his ex could have pulled a #metoo revenge) But the author needed to make him sympathetic, to imply any one of us could have gotten caught up in this. Judge not for you too will be judged, and the like. i.e. Bo-ring.
Since so much of the novel was thinly disguised reality (The Rag -with it's on-line success & framed covers in the lobby- was a stand-in for Vice and the fabricator was surely inspired by Johann Hari) I wondered if this 'fiction' was an inspirational (i.e. still not true) memoir of Boryga. That would explain why he was so desperate to make the protagonist likeable. Plus with so much plot hinging on real life, the Jerry Springer gotcha plot twist was ridiculous on many levels. First off, CNN doesn't do those types of hot spot interviews. No white lady would dare question the intersectionality before them; it's already been established that she's one of the 'good ones', right? And a publisher would not allow their good name to go down in flames on national tv - even if the news was accompanied by the announcement that they'd fired him.
But maybe Boryga is playing me. He's got all the ghetto lingo in here, and he's a bonafide identity licensed to use that vocabulary, and we (that includes his editor, publisher, and white-lady me) just lap it up as authentic. Maybe he just gave his audience - like his protagonist- what they wanted. Sort of like Yann Martel with his book Beatrice and Virgil. So if that's his game, then kudos. Well played.
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