Project and content management for Contemporary Authors volumes
WORK TITLE: How Are You Going to Save Yourself
WORK NOTES:
PSEUDONYM(S): Holmes, Jeff
BIRTHDATE:
WEBSITE:
CITY: Milwaukee
STATE: WI
COUNTRY: United States
NATIONALITY: American
RESEARCHER NOTES:
PERSONAL
Born in Denver, CO.
EDUCATION:Graduated from Amherst College; Also attended Iowa Writers’ Workshop and Napa Valley Writers’ Conference.
ADDRESS
CAREER
Writer. Has worked in educational outreach in IA, MA, and RI.
AWARDS:Burnett Howe Prize for fiction, Amherst College; Henfield Prize for literature; Pushcart Prize.
WRITINGS
Contributor to periodicals, including Paris Review, White Review, How Journal, Missouri Review, and Gettysburg.
SIDELIGHTS
J.M. Holmes is a Denver, Colorado, native who was raised in Rhode Island. In addition to writing, Holmes has worked in educational outreach in Iowa, Massachusetts, and Rhode Island. He attended Amherst College, where he won the Burnett Howe Prize for fiction. He has received fellowships to the Iowa Writers’ Workshop and the Napa Valley Writers’ Conference. Holmes lives in Milwaukee.
How Are You Going to Save Yourself, Holmes’s first book, is a series of interconnected stories about four young black men growing up in Rhode Island. Dubs, Rolls, Rye, and Gio have been friends since childhood in their working-class neighborhood. Gio, the golden boy of the crew, is the focus of most of the stories. Born to a one-time professional football player and an Italian mother, Gio is the one friend to leave the Rhode Island hometown. In college at Cornell, he meets wealthy youth whose upbringings are worlds away from his own. He moves to New York City to pursue a career as a professional rapper, where he promptly parties away his money on drugs and alcohol. Dubs has hopes for a professional football career, despite his mediocre skills. Once the group’s troublemaker, in adulthood Dubs accepts a job as a security systems salesman, though he feels like a sellout. Rye, the athletically talented one of the group, finds himself drawn to the streets. He jumps from career to career, selling drugs all the while. Eventually, he finds stability as a firefighter, though he struggles to stay away from the fast life of a drug dealer. Rolls, an aspiring photographer, finds success as an artist and graphic designer. The stories examine blackness, male identity, and the evolution of friendship. The book is peppered with the moments that highlight many coming-of-age stories—explorations into sex, partying, and class—and each character experiences these landmarks in different ways. The stories pick apart the definition of success, wholeness, and identity through the lenses of the four men.
A contributor to Publishers Weekly described the book as “a collection of superb stories,” adding, “Holmes proves his ability to navigate vulnerability.” Sarah Gilmartin at the Irish Times website described How Are You Going to Save Yourself as “a layered and occasionally unsettling look at race, relationships and sex.” A contributor to Kirkus Reviews wrote, “The stories are by turns comedic, bawdy, heartbreaking, and grisly,” noting that the book “makes you thirst for whatever’s coming next.”
BIOCRIT
PERIODICALS
Kirkus Reviews, June 15, 2018, review of How Are You Going to Save Yourself.
Publishers Weekly, June 18, 2018, review of How Are You Going to Save Yourself, p. 74.
ONLINE
Guardian Online, https://www.theguardian.com/ (August 24, 2018), Irenosen Okojie, review of How Are You Going to Save Yourself.
Irish Times Online, https://www.irishtimes.com/ (August 11, 2018), Sarah Gilmartin, review of How Are You Going to Save Yourself.
J.M. Holmes website, https://www.jeff-m-holmes.com (November 9, 2018).*
JM Holmes was born in Denver and raised in Rhode Island. He won the Burnett Howe Prize for fiction at Amherst College, and received fellowships to the Iowa Writers' Workshop and the Napa Valley Writers' Conference. He has worked in educational outreach in Iowa, Massachusetts, and Rhode Island. He lives in Milwaukee and is currently at work on a novel.
What’s Wrong with Us: An Interview with J. M. Holmes
By Caitlin Youngquist August 24, 2017
Inside the Issue
Photo by Julie Keresztes.
J. M. Holmes’s “What’s Wrong with You? What’s Wrong with Me?” appears in our Summer issue (no. 221); it’s Holmes’s first published story. Next year, it will be included in the collection How Are You Going to Save Yourself. Like the other stories in the collection, “What’s Wrong with You? What’s Wrong with Me?” follows a group of friends, four young black men—Dub, Rolls, G., and Rye—as they navigate the tangle of sex, race, and class. The story opens with Dub pressing Rye with the question “How many white women you been with?” Rye shies away from answering amid the group but later tells G., in confidence, about a sexual encounter with a white woman that left him at once ashamed and exhilarated.
I spoke with Holmes over the phone recently, just after he’d returned to Milwaukee from a trip through Portugal, Italy, and Croatia with his mother and sister. He was laid back and cool, despite admitting that he was nervous. (“That was my first interview,” he told me afterward. “I feel like I just asked my girl to prom.”) We talked openly about intimacy in interracial relationships, the black body as sexual fetish, and shadeism.
(NB: Some of the story’s details are purposefully left out, so as not to spoil the experience for our readers. But you can read “What’s Wrong with You? What’s Wrong with Me?” here.)
INTERVIEWER
Let’s start with the most obvious question. When did you start writing?
HOLMES
As a little kid, I wrote fantasy and poetry and stuff, but I didn’t start writing seriously until college, at Amherst. That’s where I met Judith Frank. She was the first person to take me in and say, You can do this, you’re good at this thing. Then Amity Gaige. Then I took a bunch of creative-writing classes.
INTERVIEWER
You went to Iowa.
HOLMES
Yeah. But it’s a revolving door over there. So many people come through—it’s fucking huge. Well, twenty-five people in every class, and then you’re there with sixty other writers, and people have a tendency to really hang on. They go there and they don’t ever want to leave because they have access to these brilliant writers and agents and everything. I enjoyed parts of it. I think the best part was getting to meet the professors, the writers who care about your work, and being given the money and the time to write. I got my agent through Iowa, and I think … well, I obviously wouldn’t be talking to you if it wasn’t for Iowa, so in that regard I love it. But socially, it’s a bit draining. You have a lot of talented people in a small space competing for resources. It’s not a recipe for a lot of friendships or good times.
INTERVIEWER
Who influences your work as a writer?
HOLMES
I can’t stop listening to Frank Ocean. He cuts to the center of sentiment in a good way. And Kendrick Lamar—I think he’s a genius. I definitely listen to music more than I read books. Don’t get me wrong, I read a lot. But I grew up rapping. Like, really, truly rapping. The most hurtful comment I got at workshop was from a woman who wasn’t a fan of mine, for another story in the collection where G.’s freestyling. She said, I just don’t think this narrator could rap like that. And I was like, First of all, that’s not really a critique. And second of all, you know what? That’s bullshit. I was so offended.
I’m a big fan of Walter Mosley, too—he’s just so unmistakably himself. I’ve read a bunch of his detective fiction.
INTERVIEWER
In one of your stories, a character wants to get a tattoo of the line “People are trapped in history and history is trapped in them,” from Baldwin’s essay “Stranger in the Village.” Did Baldwin factor in?
HOLMES
Baldwin, yeah. Was it Mosley who said that he wishes he could be like Baldwin, so cool in his hatred? I had never come across a thinker like Baldwin. He’s a big-time motivator. I wrote “What’s Wrong with You? What’s Wrong with Me?” before I read “Going to Meet the Man,” but “Going to Meet the Man” overlaps a lot thematically with this story. So when I read it, I was like, Aw, shit, Baldwin already did it. It was great … better. He got there before everybody, and we’re all still in conversation with him. If you’re black and you write something of merit—especially if you’re a black man—he’s automatically going to come up in conversation. I wouldn’t say he directly influenced my work, but anyone who picks him up and reads him … he stays with you.
INTERVIEWER
Where did “What’s Wrong with You? What’s Wrong with Me?” come from?
HOLMES
Well, it’s not really new in the black community. I think the story will be shocking for a lot of people, but it won’t be shocking for black readers. I sent the collection to some friends of mine, and one of them said, I like the collection, but I hate the first story. It’s kind of been played out. Like, she’d just heard it too many times. It hurt my feelings, but to a certain extent I agree. It’s all over the Internet, it’s a major narrative in porn. It’s everywhere.
INTERVIEWER
So why write it?
HOLMES
I consider myself very American. I might not love this country, but it’s the only one I know. And the entire collection is meant to explore an American point of view, our psychology … or psychosis. With this story, what’s more important to me than pointing out that black people are fetishized—though all of that is in the background or the foreground, or however you want to put it—is the question of how someone maintains a genuine, truthful, intimate relationship with someone else if they’re afraid that that’s in the back of their mind, the back of their throat, you know? Can someone maintain that relationship?
INTERVIEWER
Do you think it’s possible?
HOLMES
I think so … I hope so. My girlfriend’s white. A couple years ago maybe I thought you couldn’t or that it’d be too hard, but I don’t think it’s one size fits all. If a relationship is going to fail, it’s going to fail on a lot of fronts. You’re probably not going to be blindsided by something like that.
I have a lot of liberal friends who will argue that sex is just sex, then you go about your business. But at what point is that not true? There has to be a line somewhere. In Rye’s case, for someone to be able to do this to him—to go there, to say that … You can’t just put that away, I don’t think, unless you have a steel-trap mind maybe, but even then I don’t think you can. It’s pervasive, it spills over into your everyday thoughts.
INTERVIEWER
But at the end, Rye tells G. what happened and says he “loved it,” that it made him “harder,” that he “wanted her so bad.”
HOLMES
I’m not a psychologist. I try to be, but I have no training and I don’t know how much I believe in psychology. What I do know is that I wanted everyone to be complicit. I wanted everyone to be guilty. “Guilty” isn’t the right word, but I didn’t want anyone to come away squeaky clean, as if you could say, Oh, she transgressed and he was a strong black man, or, He became violent and she’s the victim. It’s a lot messier than that. A lot of it gets internalized. You don’t have time to reason your way through it and say, Oh, I shouldn’t enjoy this, or, This is demeaning, or ask yourself why it’s getting you off. You’re just left to think about it later.
INTERVIEWER
As Rye says earlier, “I been conditioned.”
HOLMES
That’s a riff on Chameleon Street, which is the only movie in history to win Sundance and not get picked up by a major distributor. And it didn’t get picked up because white distributors didn’t know what to do with this black film that wasn’t, like, a Blaxploitation film. It’s a Catch Me If You Can type. But the opening scene is two guys talking about a woman with good hair, and one of them says, Man, I’ve been conditioned … Even my conditioning’s been conditioned. So it was meant to be a joke, but jokes don’t entirely cover up truths either, as much as they try. So yeah, it’s definitely supposed to read that way.
INTERVIEWER
G. seems to wonder if this is in the back of his girlfriend Madie’s mind, too. If she doesn’t also have a “black appetite,” to borrow a phrase from the story. He says twice to himself, in quick succession, “I wasn’t on an auction block in front of her.” As though he needs convincing.
HOLMES
I think it’s a little heavy-handed to say he needs convincing, but for me, that’s exactly where the heart of the story lies. It’s not so much that race play happens, that sexual fetishes happen, but again it’s, How do we return to what is “normal,” how do we return to intimacy? So for G., that’s definitely a soul-searching moment, trying to figure out whether or not this is in Madie’s head, too. And if it is, how to compartmentalize it.
There were a few black women at Iowa who really hated the way white women were portrayed in this collection. They felt the heavens parted when white women were on the page—like when G.’s in the shower with Madie, washing her hair, or when Rye’s looking at the photo of G.’s aunt, stuff like that—and there aren’t really any black women in this story. So they saw the collection as a deification of white women. Some of that’s intentional, but some of it’s probably my own lack of awareness, too.
INTERVIEWER
Where do you think that comes from?
HOLMES
Shadeism is a very, very real part of my life, and it’s a subtle motivator in a lot of my work. It’s another common trend that is as old as racism itself. We grow up looking at whitewashed models and all that. I feel like even Queen B was criticized for not wearing her hair naturally or for using makeup to appear lighter—I can’t remember. But even when we are aware of the issue it doesn’t mean that some of that pathology hasn’t already seeped into our thinking. So when white women get deified on the page subconsciously, it doesn’t surprise me, but it’s something I try to be aware of.
INTERVIEWER
A friend of mine read “What’s Wrong with You? What’s Wrong with Me?” and wondered if the girl at the end, with Rye, was Madie, which hadn’t crossed my mind, but now I can’t stop thinking about it. You know, since Dub is joking about Madie sleeping around while G.’s away at school and egging Rye on to say how many white women he’s been with …
HOLMES
That’s a dark-ass twist. It was supposed to be ambiguous, for sure. But it never crossed my mind that that would be the situation. What Dub says is definitely supposed to have some validity, to make G. sweat, but … damn, that’s a dark read.
Caitlin Youngquist is an associate editor at The Paris Review.
J.M. Holmes was born in Denver and raised in Rhode Island. He won the Burnett Howe prize for fiction at Amherst College, received fellowships at the Iowa Writer’s Workshop and the Napa Valley Writers’ Conference. He’s worked in educational outreach in Iowa, Massachusetts and Rhode Island. He is currently at work on a novel while teaching in China.
J.M. Holmes was born in Denver and raised in Rhode Island. His literary prizes include: Burnett Howe prize for fiction at Amherst College, the Henfield prize for literature, and a Pushcart prize. He's received fellowships at the Iowa Writer’s Workshop and the Napa Valley Writers’ Conference. He’s worked in educational outreach in Iowa, Massachusetts and Rhode Island. His work has appeared in The Paris Review, The White Review, How Journal, and is upcoming in the Missouri Review and Gettysburg. His debut book How Are You Going to Save Yourself will be published with Little, Brown August 21, 2018 and Sceptre books August 9, 2018.
How Are You Going to Save Yourself
Publishers Weekly. 265.25 (June 18, 2018): p74.
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2018 PWxyz, LLC
http://www.publishersweekly.com/
Full Text:
How Are You Going to Save Yourself
J.M. Holmes. Little, Brown, $26 (256p) ISBN 978-0-316-51488-0
In Holmes's crackling debut of interconnected stories, Dubs, Rolls, Rye, and Gio are four young black men growing up in Rhode Island. The main character is Gio, born to a one-time pro footballer father and an Italian mother, who is also the one who "makes it," leaving for college at Cornell and befriending the kind of moneyed youth who "live like some fucking rappers," in Dub's words. Standouts include the first story, "What's Wrong with You? What's Wrong with Me?," in which a seemingly jocular question from Dub about how many white women they have all slept with leads to the confrontation of some uncomfortable truths for Rolls, and "Toll for the Passengers," in which Gio is forced to make some difficult decisions when an RV full of drunk college students hits a car on his street and his cousin Isaac escalates the situation. For all his excellence, however, Holmes does not write female characters with the same nuance he affords his male characters, and readers will wish that characters like Gio's little sister, Whit--who is excellent in "Outside Tacoma"--or Tayla, the high school girl Rolls meets in "Be Good to Me," were given more page space. Nevertheless, Holmes proves his ability to navigate vulnerability, as well as his fearlessness in tackling tense situations head-on, all of which combines for a collection of superb stories. (Aug.)
Source Citation (MLA 8th Edition)
"How Are You Going to Save Yourself." Publishers Weekly, 18 June 2018, p. 74. General OneFile, http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A544712379/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=ITOF&xid=b37a6a91. Accessed 20 Sept. 2018.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A544712379
Holmes, JM: HOW ARE YOU GOING TO SAVE YOURSELF
Kirkus Reviews. (June 15, 2018):
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2018 Kirkus Media LLC
http://www.kirkusreviews.com/
Full Text:
Holmes, JM HOW ARE YOU GOING TO SAVE YOURSELF Little, Brown (Adult Fiction) $26.00 8, 21 ISBN: 978-0-316-51487-3
As up-to-the-minute as a Kendrick Lamar track and as ruefully steeped in eternal truths as a Gogol tale, these stories of young working-class black men coming into their dubious inheritances mark the debut of an assured young talent in American storytelling.
We'll start with Gio since his is the voice telling most of these interrelated stories of love, longing, and thwarted aspiration among men of color growing up in the hilly, blue-collar enclave of Pawtucket, Rhode Island. He is the mixed-race son of a professional football player named Lonnie "The Lion" Campbell, whose career, along with his mind, declined in shockingly abrupt ways. Dub, one of Gio's childhood friends, dreamed of playing pro football though, as Gio recounts, he wasn't as good as their other friend, Rye, who as an adult answers to the dual calling of dealing drugs and fighting fires. Then there's Rolls, whose hard, street-coarsened manner belies a spirit romantic and inquisitive enough to become absorbed in photography. Each of these four young men, as different in temperament as they are similar in sensitivity, is enmeshed in struggles to break free of the constrictions imposed on his dreams by society and by himself. Gio, who has come into considerable money in part because of a settlement with the NFL over his dad's untimely deterioration and death, is shown squandering these funds on drugs and other diversions in New York City while flashing gifts as a free-style rap artist. At least he gets out of Pawtucket while his friends struggle with their respective demons--and with the wise and often too-forbearing women in their lives. The stories are by turns comedic, bawdy, heartbreaking, and grisly. What links them all is the heady style deployed throughout; language with the same taut rhythm and blunt imagery as the best hip-hop yet capable of intermittent surges of lyricism that F. Scott Fitzgerald in his own precocious stories of youthful romance and remorse could summon.
The publisher says Holmes is working on his first novel. This collection makes you thirst for whatever's coming next.
Source Citation (MLA 8th Edition)
"Holmes, JM: HOW ARE YOU GOING TO SAVE YOURSELF." Kirkus Reviews, 15 June 2018. General OneFile, http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A543008999/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=ITOF&xid=c55fecd0. Accessed 20 Sept. 2018.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A543008999
How Are You Going to Save Yourself by JM Holmes: sharp, vibrant tales
A debut collection tells interlinked stories of race, friendship and sexual violence
JM Holmes: the collection is peppered with sharp observations on race
Sarah Gilmartin
Sat, Aug 11, 2018, 06:00
First published:
Sat, Aug 11, 2018, 06:00
Buy Now
Book Title:
How Are You Going to Save Yourself?
ISBN-13:
978-1473677715
Author:
JM Holmes
Publisher:
Sceptre
Guideline Price:
£14.99
With excellent pedigree for a debut author, including stories published in the White Review and the Paris Review, and a fellowship from the renowned Iowa Writers’ Workshop, expectations for the American author JM Holmes’ first collection are high. Exploring the lives of four African-American friends from a working-class town in Rhode Island, How Are You Going to Save Yourself for the most part achieves what it sets out to do, offering a layered and occasionally unsettling look at race, relationships and sex among a group of men in early adulthood.
It is not a collection without flaws, however, some of which have a tendency to drag down otherwise vibrant tales. Holmes switches clumsily between characters in his stories, diluting the power of scenes. This is most obvious in the otherwise gripping Be Good to Me, which charts the relationship, if you can call it that, between one of the four friends, Rolls, and the impressionable high school senior Tayla.
Rolls is the kind of gent who ignores Tayla at parties and then later holds her head down when she tries to stop giving him oral sex in a car. Both characters’ perspectives are interesting, but as the stakes rise to a grim situation where Tayla is pressured into group sex without her consent, her voice wins out: “He stared Tayla straight in the eye and she felt her body tense. They were all focused on her, but not really her, some imagined girl. Their eyes were buried in her body.”
Holmes is strong on dialogue, and the dialect of the four friends when they’re hanging out together
It is a clever and emotive piece of writing, third in this interlinked collection of nine stories, leaving the reader with a feeling of complicity as subsequent stories show the rapists in more sympathetic light. The most morally compromised of the quartet is Dubs – brooding, violent, ready to turn on anyone, even his friends. He instigates a hold-up of an RV of rich white kids in the muddled story Toll for the Passengers. In Outside Tacoma, his racist remarks about Asian people stun guests at a party in upper Manhattan, a moment that is documented brilliantly by Holmes.
The collection is peppered with sharp observations on race. From the white woman who debases Rolls during sex by calling him the n-word (and the searing admission that it turned him on), to the cops who harass the boys as they sit on a kerb, the deplorability is depicted in memorable lines and images: “I thought about the type of white women who went out in search of that, the ones who kept the word in the backs of their throats – an ugly appetite.”
Vulnerability
Holmes structures his collection in a way that calls attention to biases. Having set Dubs up as a kind of villain, the penultimate story Dresscode shows the man’s vulnerability as he struggles to keep his girlfriend Simone against a backdrop of disadvantage and poverty: “In a different life, they would settle down like his bro and his wife, in a suburb, have people over for parties. He tried to laugh at himself. What type of caged-bird shit was that?”
This story is typical of a recurring problem of trying to do too much. It flits awkwardly between Simone and Dubs’ viewpoints, with their pet names for each other causing further problems. Elsewhere the author’s hand is evident in stories that are frontloaded with exposition. In The Legend of Lonnie Lion, Lonnie’s past as a former sporting hero is related without nuance by his mixed-race son Gio, the collection’s main narrator. The juxtaposition of Lonnie’s downward spiral with his teenage son’s sexual exploits works well enough, though clarity of purpose is lost amid too many voices and too much action.
The occasional non sequitur doesn’t help matters. “Wandering eyes aside, they had seemed to sparkle in their suburban home near Denver,” Gio tells us about a girlfriend’s parents. In another story, an ex brushes him off because she knows about his current girlfriend “the way millennials know about the Cold War” (while the same girl’s thighs “billow” in her shorts).
Holmes is strong on dialogue, and the dialect of the four friends when they’re hanging out together. The edgy one-upmanship, the nicknames, the language they use to skirt around issues of sex and masculinity – “he caught shade”, “he didn’t smash” – the reclaiming of the n-word: “I had some friends from college that used the word like a blanket, for punctuation in mixed company, for armour.”
A neat circuity links the collection’s opening and closing stories, both steeped in the politics of race, sex and violence – and the angry young men trying to find a way to sidestep the legacies. It is fitting that the question of the title gets no clear answer from any of the four friends by the collection’s end. In Holmes’ gritty, volatile world there are few saviours.
Sat, Aug 11, 2018, 06:00
First published:
Sat, Aug 11, 2018, 06:00
How Are You Going To Save Yourself by JM Holmes review – what it means to be black in America
An exciting, urgent and nuanced debut collection following the lives of four young men coming of age in the US
Irenosen Okojie
Fri 24 Aug 2018 07.01 BST
Shares
26
Comments
3
JM Holmes explores codes of masculinity and the fractious nature of camaraderie. Photograph: Julie Keresztes
T
he raucous, heartbreaking, bawdy tales in JM Holmes’s debut collection possess an assured lyricism, uncompromising in its interrogation of race, class, drugs and family. The book follows a decade in the lives of four friends: Rydell, Lazarus, Rakim and Giovanni – known as Dub, Rolls, Rye and Gio. They are young black men becoming adults in Pawtucket, Rhode Island, navigating the pressures of home and friendship, and society’s expectations of what it means to be black in America. In the explosive opener “What’s Wrong With You? What’s Wrong With Me?”, a discussion about the number of white girls they have each been with rapidly descends into chaos. It’s a clever exploration of the fractious nature of camaraderie, of codes of masculinity and the way many black men see white women as trophies – barometers of success in a world that ruthlessly oppresses them. By turns funny, surprising and deeply uncomfortable, the story culminates in a moment so brutally honest, so quietly ferocious, it left me dazed.
Sign up for Bookmarks: discover new books in our weekly email
Read more
In “The Legend of Lonnie Lion”, Holmes deftly addresses family dysfunction and the complexity of mixed-race identities. Here, the teenage Gio moves back and forth between his black father and Italian mother, humorously resigned to their warring perspectives on who he should be and what he should become. There’s a whiff of broken American dreams around his father, a former NFL player who never realised his potential, and his mother, a self-taught property developer, yet Holmes’s eye remains unwaveringly unsentimental. He avoids straying into cliche despite the familiar tropes of part-time fathers and long-suffering mothers.
Advertisement
–– ADVERTISEMENT ––
The devastating “Be Good to Me” tackles the intricacies of young lust and blurred lines of consent. A wily, charismatic Rolls seduces the smitten Tayla. We encounter the headiness of a mutual infatuation, the dance and language of youthful romance, as well as the conditioning of young boys and girls and power dynamics between men and women, manifested so early on. We are reminded of a patriarchal system that privileges young men and presents young women as bodies to be conquered. As the story hurtles towards its shockingly dark ending, we are left with the feeling that Holmes has performed a trick of sorts – that a heinous act conducted with such ease and duplicity should be the work of more familiar malefactors. This is a story with a dark centre, unsettling the reader while Holmes cranks up the tension.
As time passes and the stories unfold, Dub’s early hopes of playing pro football fade, and the group’s troublemaker winds up as a dissatisfied security systems salesman struggling to cling to a sense of himself. Rye, athletically gifted, succumbs to the call of the streets, restlessly moving from one career aspiration to the next before embracing his calling as a firefighter; Rolls, an aspiring photographer whose bravado belies his sensitivity, eventually becomes an artist and graphic designer. Only Gio breaks out of Pawtucket, as a rap artist, promptly squandering money on drugs and gaining new demons in New York.
As with any collection, some stories are stronger than others. Holmes renders male characters with microscopic precision; the same level of nuance afforded to his female characters would have added even more depth to stories such as “Outside Tacoma”. Even the standout “Be Good to Me” left me longing for more of Tayla’s perspective – the sign of a story that has made its mark. There’s no doubt that Holmes displays a refreshing level of courage in his willingness to tackle difficult subjects.
The bonds between the young men shift as their adult lives pull them in different directions, and they are torn between what the world demands of them and how they want to define themselves. These are images of life that tantalisingly glimmer, treading the line between humour and pathos, offering sharp insights into the black American experience. Holmes has been compared to Junot Díaz and Ta-Nehisi Coates, but he is a distinctive writer in his own right. Spare in style, strikingly urgent, his is a voice to get excited about.
• Irenosen Okojie’s short story collection Speak Gigantular is published by Jacaranda. How Are You Going to Save Yourself is published by Sceptre. To order a copy for £12.74 (RRP £14.99) go to guardianbookshop.com or call 0330 333 6846. Free UK p&p over £10, online orders only. Phone orders min p&p of £1.99.