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Fiction

Black, Gay and Losing Faith

Uzodinma IwealaCredit...Caroline Cuse

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SPEAK NO EVIL
By Uzodinma Iweala
215 pp. HarperCollins Publishers. $26.99.

“The American dream” is an apt phrase, because dreams are illogical. The immigrant lives at a remove from the land of her birth and the land of her choice; if it’s not the White House reminding you that you don’t belong, it’s your kids, the fruition of your American dreams who end up just so, well, American.

Niru, the narrator of Uzodinma Iweala’s “Speak No Evil,” would seem to be his Nigerian-born parents’ greatest success: sociable and athletic, cultured and Harvard-bound. At the same time, Niru, because of his homosexuality, embodies this particular illogic: His gayness is no particular tragedy in the eyes of his peers, but an absolute betrayal of God’s plan in the eyes of his parents.

This is the central conflict in Iweala’s slender book, one the author handles with admirable cool. Though Niru is still young (he’s a senior in high school), he understands his parents even as they fail to understand him: “Our father lives somewhere between the self-satisfaction that his success has made us soft and disgust that we are unacquainted with the brutal intensity of a world that he has effectively tamed for us.”

Iweala published his first book, “Beasts of No Nation,” in 2005, when he was only 23. It’s a catalog of horrors narrated by a child soldier conscripted into an armed conflict in an unnamed West African country. It’s less a novel than an exercise in voice, told in stylized, ungrammatical sentences. It doesn’t add up to much, which is the point; it bears witness to something meaningless, then forces the reader to find meaning in atrocity.

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Credit...Alessandra Montalto/The New York Times

“Speak No Evil” is a quite different endeavor. Iweala is still interested in style, this time the kind of clarity we sometimes associate with Hemingway and mistakenly term simple. A characteristic passage: “I can’t think straight enough to remember where I put my keys, this pocket or that pocket, this pocket, yes. And my car? I slam my palms against the wall. Again. The skin turns pink. You are not like these white children, my mother says except on my palms that turn pink like their skin turns pink, but only when hurt, or scared or stressed.”

We meet Niru in the winter of his senior year, at a tony Washington, D.C., private school. Released from classes because of a snowstorm, he seeks refuge at the nearby home of his dearest friend, Meredith, where her attempt to seduce him leads to the confession of his homosexuality. If the scene has the patina of an after-school special (earnestness, a touch of melodrama), Iweala deploys the present tense and an unfussy syntax to hook the reader, and it works well.

Meredith, playing the role of understanding gal pal, installs Grindr and Tinder on Niru’s cellphone. Of course the boy loses the phone, and the secret comes out. The ensuing confrontation with his father is violent and heartbreaking: “Are you really telling me the truth, that you are going out and gallivanting with the gays, the homosexuals? Where did you learn this kind of behavior? Is it in school? Is this what they are teaching you?”

Not long ago, in his column for New York magazine, Andrew Sullivan wrote that “the radicalization of the movement’s ideology and rhetoric” is to blame for “a retrenchment in comfort with gay equality.” Iweala gives the lie to this claim elegantly; some people just hate homosexuality, no matter how much they love their children.

Niru’s mother is a cosmopolitan daughter of privilege, now a physician; his father is a “true village boy” who climbed his way to corporate success and American comfort. Upon discovering their son’s secret, they turn to faith. “It sometimes seems that every African living in the D.C. area goes to this church, Nigerians, Ghanaians, Cameroonians, Congolese. Some work for embassies. Some are taxi drivers. Some are illegal, but they are all truly welcome.” Well, not quite all. Niru’s father takes him to his boyhood home in Nigeria, where they visit still another church.

This intercession, existing in the realm of the spiritual, seems less pernicious than it actually is; it’s not religion but psychological torture, and it occasions a kind of break in the narrator’s psyche. His parents replace his smartphone with Bible verses. “I take the cards — Genesis 4:7, Luke 5:32, First Corinthians 6:18 — and put them in my pocket without looking at them. I have a stack on a shelf in my closet. They remind me of all the things I should do.” It’s not Niru who is closeted any longer; it’s his parents’ God.

Niru’s homosexuality is very much the book’s subject, and the text is interested in dualities — Americans and Africans, white and black, gay and straight, devout and skeptic, the black immigrant and the black American (a role filled by Damien, a college student with whom our hero has a sweet, chaste fling) — while always returning to the question of what his gayness says about who Niru is.

Iweala writes with such ease about adolescents and adolescence that “Speak No Evil” could well be a young adult novel. At the same time he toys with other well-defined forms: the immigrant novel, the gay coming-of-age novel, the novel of being black in America. The resulting book is a hybrid of all these.

If he’s something of a remix artist, Iweala remains faithful to the conventions of these forms, a writer so adept that the book’s climax feels both surprising and wholly inevitable. Its concluding third is narrated by Meredith, not Niru, a strategy that should feel clunky but doesn’t. As with “Beasts of No Nation,” Iweala resists offering the reader much in the way of closure or even insight, as though to suggest that’s the reader’s job, not his.

A writer cannot be judged for his project, only its execution. Uzodinma Iweala is a fine and confident novelist. Genre is a useful thing when organizing texts in a bookshop, but immaterial to the particular exchange between writer and reader.

Form ossifies into genre through repetition. Eventually readers — and writers are of course readers themselves — understand that stories about immigrants function in a certain way, that stories about gayness require a moral reckoning, that stories about blackness require the sacrifice of the black body. For all the interest among readers in creating a literature that reflects its readership, so-called “diverse books,” there are times that “diverse book” seems itself a genre, bound by convention and largely a matter of the identity of a writer who is different from the thousand or so writers we believe to be the canon.

In his smart exploration of generational conflict, of what it is to be a gay man, of the crisis of existence as a black man, Iweala is very much a realist. Perhaps the trouble is my own wish that reality itself were different.

Rumaan Alam is the special projects editor, Books, at The Times and author of the forthcoming novel “That Kind of Mother.”

A version of this article appears in print on  , Page 8 of the Sunday Book Review with the headline: Black, Gay and Losing Faith. Order Reprints | Today’s Paper | Subscribe

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