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WORK TITLE: They come in All Colors
WORK NOTES:
PSEUDONYM(S):
BIRTHDATE:
WEBSITE: https://www.malcolmhansen.com/
CITY: New York
STATE: NY
COUNTRY: United States
NATIONALITY: American
RESEARCHER NOTES:
PERSONAL
Born in Chattanooga, TN; married; children: two sons.
EDUCATION:Stanford University, B.A.; Columbia University, M.F.A.
ADDRESS
CAREER
Writer. Has worked in the software industry.
WRITINGS
SIDELIGHTS
Malcolm Hansen explores a mixed-race boy’s coming of age in the 1960s in his debut novel, They Come in All Colors. Huey Fairchild is the son of a white father and an African-American mother, but he has difficulty perceiving himself as African-American, and the people around him often have trouble placing him in a racial category. As the story opens, it is 1969 and Huey, at fifteen, is attending Claremont Preparatory Academy, a private boys’ school in New York City, where he is the only nonwhite student and one of the few who does not come from wealth. He has a keen intelligence but a caustic wit. He has only one friend, an awkward boy named Ariel J. Zukowski, and a fight over a girl leads to the end of the boys’ bond. Flashbacks portray Huey seven years earlier, as a child in Georgia as the civil rights movement is stepping up its activity. Huey does not fully understand the issues involved, and he identifies with his white father, a peanut farmer, more than he does with his black neighbors. He even considers his light-skinned mother to be white. Throughout the story, Huey struggles with questions of identity.
Several critics found the story compelling and to some degree reminiscent of both J. D. Salinger’s The Catcher in the Rye and Harper Lee’s To Kill a Mockingbird. One could envision them joining forces “to forge this shaggy, rakish, yet haunting account of a smart aleck’s coming-of-age in harsh times,” a Kirkus Reviews contributor remarked. Rebecca Hannigan, writing online at Into the Void, noted that Huey “speaks like a younger, but, surprisingly, more crass version of Holden Caulfield,” the protagonist of The Catcher in the Rye. In addition, she observed, there is a “To Kill A Mockingbird-esque mystery around the death of a black man named Toby” in the Georgia-set section. There is more to Huey’s tale than the echoes of these works, however, according to the reviewers. “More than just a coming-of-age, Huey’s story is—pardon the cheesiness—a coming-into-race and coming-into-rage at what he realizes about the world around him and its endless problems,” Hannigan reported. The Kirkus Reviews critic called the novel “gripping, scorching, and at times vexing.” but added that eventually it makes readers see that Huey’s struggle represents “the struggle America has, to the present day, to understand its own complex fate.” Xpress Reviews commentator Barbara Hoffert praised They Come in All Colors as well, saying Hansen “offers an understanding of Huey’s situation that is distinctive and surprising.”
BIOCRIT
PERIODICALS
Hollywood Reporter, December 23, 2016, Ford, Rebecca, and Andy Lewis, “Rights Available! Hot New Books with Hollywood Appeal,” p. 37.
Kirkus Reviews, June 1, 2018, review of They Come in All Colors.
Xpress Reviews, April 13, 2018, Barbara Hoffert, review of They Come in All Colors.
ONLINE
Into the Void, https://intothevoidmagazine.com/ (June 11, 2018), Rebecca Hannigan, review of They Come in All Colors.
Malcolm Hansen website, https://www.malcolmhansen.com (October 8,2018).
Malcolm Hansen was born at the Florence Crittenton Home for unwed mothers in Chattanooga, Tennessee. Adopted by two Civil Rights activists, he grew up in Morocco, Spain, Germany, and various parts of the United States. Malcolm left home as a teenager and, after two years of high school education, went to Stanford, earning a BA in philosophy. He worked for a few years in the software industry in California before setting off for what turned out to be a decade of living, working, and traveling throughout Central America, South America, and Europe. Malcolm returned to the US to complete an MFA in Fiction at Columbia University. He currently lives in New York City with his wife and two sons.
Quoted in Sidelights: “to forge this shaggy, rakish, yet haunting account of a smart aleck’s coming-of-age in harsh times,”
“gripping, scorching, and at times vexing.” “the struggle America has, to the present day, to understand its own complex fate.”
Hansen, Malcolm: THEY COME IN ALL COLORS
Kirkus Reviews. (June 1, 2018):
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2018 Kirkus Media LLC
http://www.kirkusreviews.com/
Full Text:
Hansen, Malcolm THEY COME IN ALL COLORS Atria (Adult Fiction) $26.00 5, 29 ISBN: 978-1-5011-7232-8
A gripping, scorching, and at times vexing debut novel tracks the physical and psychological jolts that come with growing up mixed race above and below the Mason-Dixon line at opposite ends of the 1960s.
When we first meet Huey Fairchild, it's 1969 and he's in very big trouble. The only student of color at an all-boys prep school in Manhattan, the 15-year-old Huey has knocked a white student unconscious in the dining hall. Their dispute is over a girl, though school authorities immediately misperceive the cause. But then, misperception is the story of Huey's life, and author Hansen offers the flashbacks to prove it. The story makes frequent and sustained shifts back in time to Akersburg, Georgia, seven years earlier, when 8-year-old Huey, though precocious and keenly observant in so many ways, cannot understand why his summer is being ruined at every turn. First, the local swimming pool is shut down shortly after he's about to use it. Then black protestors show up outside a downtown luncheonette to demonstrate, and in the ensuing uproar, Huey is struck by a car and breaks his arm. Then a black farmhand who'd worked with Huey's white peanut-farmer father before joining the demonstrations falls to his death from a ladder, arousing grief and suspicion from the local black community. Huey's reactions throughout that summer of 1962 are curious. His attitudes toward the local African-American population are as oblivious and, sometimes, dismissive as those of his father. At one point, he recalls thinking of his light-skinned black mother as "the darkest white person I know." And there's no letup when the summer ends. His first day back at school, the younger Huey responds to a barrage of racial epithets directed toward him by saying to his teacher, "my daddy is white, so I'm white. You know that, right?" Such credulity mystifies and, at times, exasperates the reader until one understands that Huey's painful passage toward understanding himself is a proper analogy for the struggle America has, to the present day, to understand its own complex fate.
It's possible to imagine literary recluses J.D. Salinger and Harper Lee coming out of hiding to forge this shaggy, rakish, yet haunting account of a smart aleck's coming-of-age in harsh times.
Source Citation (MLA 8th Edition)
"Hansen, Malcolm: THEY COME IN ALL COLORS." Kirkus Reviews, 1 June 2018. General OneFile, http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A540723378/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=ITOF&xid=2e33ebbc. Accessed 20 Sept. 2018.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A540723378
Rights available! Hot new books with Hollywood appeal
Rebecca Ford and Andy Lewis
Hollywood Reporter. 422.40 (Dec. 23, 2016): p37.
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2016 Prometheus Global Media LLC
http://www.hollywoodreporter.com/
Full Text:
They Come in All Colors (ATRIA)
by Malcolm Hansen
AGENCY New Leaf
In the wake of Moonlight comes another coming-of-age tale about black masculinity, out in spring 2018. A biracial 13-year-old boy uprooted from his small Georgia hometown to a New York prep school in 1969 faces the effects of racism and his own anger, which threaten his future.
Whatever Happened to InterracialLove? (ECCO)
BY Kathleen Collins
AGENCY UTA
This posthumous collection from the overlooked African-American filmmaker (Losing Ground), who died in 1988, is popping up on year-end "best of" lists. The short stories, mainly set during the civil rights era, deal with love and sexuality across the color line.
Source Citation (MLA 8th Edition)
Ford, Rebecca, and Andy Lewis. "Rights available! Hot new books with Hollywood appeal." Hollywood Reporter, 23 Dec. 2016, p. 37. General OneFile, http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A476729168/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=ITOF&xid=fe0d35e0. Accessed 20 Sept. 2018.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A476729168
Quoted in Sidelights: “offers an understanding of Huey’s situation that is distinctive and surprising.”
Hansen, Malcolm. They Come in All Colors
Barbara Hoffert
Xpress Reviews. (Apr. 13, 2018):
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2018 Library Journals, LLC
http://www.libraryjournal.com/lj/reviews/xpress/884170-289/xpress_reviews-first_look_at_new.html.csp
Full Text:
[STAR]Hansen, Malcolm. They Come in All Colors. Atria. May 2018. 320p. ISBN 9781501172328. $26; ebk. ISBN 9781501172342. F
[DEBUT]In this emotionally acute debut novel, effectively delivered from a child's perspective, smart-mouthed, biracial Huey Fairchild is the only nonwhite student at New York's elite Claremont Prep in the 1970s. Growing up in civil rights-era Georgia, Huey hadn't see himself as biracial--he identified with his white father as the boss of black worker Nestor yet didn't seem to register his black mother's race, puzzling over why she couldn't swim at the local motel pool, as he could. Huey's family was shattered by traumatizing incidents that began with the closing of the pool (a black boy was rumored to have swum there), and he and his mother headed north, where he got a scholarship to Claremont even as his mother swallowed her disappointment with a housekeeper's job. Not surprisingly, Huey is an outsider at Claremont, learning uncomfortable truths about how we're seen and defined by others. His one friend is dorky Ariel J. Zukowski, whose betrayal leads to violence that puts Huey on the line in more ways than one. Throughout, Hansen deftly unpacks the era's tensions and the complexities of identity in ways that startle; biracial himself, he offers an understanding of Huey's situation that is distinctive and surprising.
Verdict Eye-opening and rewarding for a wide range of readers. [See Prepub Alert, 11/12/17.]--Barbara Hoffert, Library Journal
Source Citation (MLA 8th Edition)
Hoffert, Barbara. "Hansen, Malcolm. They Come in All Colors." Xpress Reviews, 13 Apr. 2018. General OneFile, http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A537267439/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=ITOF&xid=8b84b0b1. Accessed 20 Sept. 2018.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A537267439
Quoted in Sidelights: speaks like a younger, but, surprisingly, more crass version of Holden Caulfield,” a To Kill A Mockingbird-esque mystery around the death of a black man named Toby” “More than just a coming-of-age, Huey’s story is—pardon the cheesiness—a coming-into-race and coming-into-rage at what he realizes about the world around him and its endless problems,”
The World is Not a Fair Place in Malcolm Hansen’s ‘They Come in All Colors’
Published on June 11, 2018
June 12, 2018
in Book Review/Literature by Rebecca Hannigan
In Malcolm Hansen’s They Come in All Colors, we are thrown behind the eyes of Huey Fairchild, who speaks like a younger, but, surprisingly, more crass version of Holden Caulfield. Like Holden, Huey wrestles with himself and others, finding himself disoriented and at odds with his surroundings. Or, more accurately, his surroundings are at odds with him.
The novel’s start shows Huey in his snidery, pride, and snark, as he relays the events of his first day at Claremont Preparatory Academy, an elite boys’ school in New York City. We immediately feel Huey’s far removal from the rich white students who attend the school, as he considers the mansions in which they live compared to the single-bedroom apartment he and his mother share in Jacob Riis Housing in a less-than-ideal part of town. We learn more about Huey from his tone and description of making his first and only friend, Zukowski, a “little twerp” with “a mole-infested face” who offers Huey his sandwich at lunch on what is, coincidentally, Zukowski’s first day at Claremont as well. Huey, in this interaction and in others, comes across as defensive and rude, raw and honest. He describes a day when he and Zukowski took two girls to a baseball game, where there’s a moment which elucidates the reasons for his defensive rudeness. The girl he brought, and was kissing a few moments before, asks where Huey is from and is shocked when he says Georgia, shocked that he’s from the United States. Huey’s friend Zukowski—who, in this moment, loses his status as friend—leans over and explains, saying, “His dad’s white. His mom’s just colored is all . . . [Huey]’s colored.” The girl responds negatively, seemingly shocked, and Huey later says that he didn’t hear from her again. This adverse reaction represents the central conflict in Huey’s life: he is misperceived as neither black nor white, and often met with prejudice as a result. As the story gets going, with other narrative conflicts weaving in and out, this is the underlying reality which grounds them all.
While the story begins and ends with Huey in New York, most of the novel takes place when Huey is eight years old, living in his hometown: a small, fictional town named Akersburg, Georgia, in the summer heat of the civil rights movement in the 1970s. Although Akersville is fictional, it reads as if it could be any of the black-hating, God-fearing town in the South. As a child amidst the tension of the civil rights movement, Huey struggles to understand the South’s abject classification of black and white, as he is unable to to fit neatly into either category. Not only is unable to fit neatly, but he isn’t even fully aware of this inability. In his eyes, he and his mother “just tan easily,” and his father is white, which makes him white, as his father is constantly reminding him. His schoolmates and neighbors, however, have a different opinion. They call him the n-word under their breath and to his face, as early as third grade.
Huey’s age adds an interesting, but arguably problematic, element to the novel. Huey is crass: almost impressively so, for a boy who’s only eight years old. He is fluent in the language of four-letter-words, and always demonstrating his fluency, which seems somewhat unlikely. But maybe it is likely in that time and place, and I might just be a skeptic. There are also a few minor inconsistencies around Huey’s relative ignorance and/or innocence of more mature matters. He hears/sees his mom and dad loudly having sex after a heated argument, and he acknowledges that he knows what’s going on. But later, he hears his mother talking to a friend about when she was “carrying him,” and he doesn’t know to what she’s referring. This is a minor detail, but it attests to the general sort of strange mix between awareness and innocence that characterizes Huey. The confusion might be intentional, written to mimic the confusion experienced by everyone at the time, especially experienced by young black and mixed kids and teenagers who weren’t sure where they fit in the world. Or the confusion might be unintentional. Regardless, a sense of insecurity and unease around race and identity runs rampant in the narrative, which jumps back and forth between a very young, volatile Huey and a less-but-still-young, still volatile Huey whose understanding of the world and his place in it varies greatly from moment to moment, day to day. There are many components to the story, too many to closely examine: the relationship between Huey and his school-friend Zukowski, the To Kill A Mockingbird-esque mystery around the death of a black man named Toby, the relationship between Toby and Huey’s family, the deep bereavement of the pool being closed, and on and on. The reader’s vision of these many elements go in and out of focus, shifting between sharp and blurry, as the characters themselves struggle to understand.
Huey’s world shifts just as social norms shift, with buses of college-aged African Americans arriving in town to protest, involving sit-ins, violent fights, and daily arrests. In between these angry incidents, Huey, more quietly, learns what’s going on. His parents are the ones who explain the chaos to him, as his dad says, “What’s important here, in our opinion, is that you understand that the world’s not fair.” In this conversation, his parents continue to explain how Huey is “an exception,” which is a concept that Huey, apparently, doesn’t understand, as his mother goes on to explain that “some people . . . don’t have but two buckets to divide the world up into . . . and then they put you into whichever bucket they see fit. And when people like you come along and don’t fit in one bucket or the other, we call them exceptions.” This is a harsh reality to wake up and face everyday, but it’s Huey’s reality nonetheless. When you, as the reader, begin to come to terms with this reality, you’re likely to feel angry. You’re likely to feel terribly upset about the inhumanity of American history, about the almost unbelievable fight that the civil rights movement had to stage against racist insolence. The emotions are there, in Hansen’s writing, and in Huey’s gradual understanding. More than just a coming-of-age, Huey’s story is—pardon the cheesiness—a coming-into-race and coming-into-rage at what he realizes about the world around him and its endless problems. His dad, when talking about solving problems, says, “It’s more than just coloring in the lines, you know.”
Buy They Come in All Colors (Atria Books, 2018) here.