‘Days of Afrekete’ explores modern class lines

You are a Black woman living in a gorgeous 150-yearold Philadelphia house. Your husband, who is white, has cut corners while running for the state Legislature, and the FBI is closing in on him. He sucks lollipops to keep from smoking cigarettes, and, if you’re being honest, the habit repulses you. You fantasize about making your body slimmer and your jewelry heavier. Your name is Liselle. Your life will soon become a museum of shame.

Also, you do not exist; you’re the protagonist of Asali Solomon’s second novel, “The Days of Afrekete.” But you are one of those fictional characters so three-dimensionally rendered that it’s easy for a reader to slip into their expensive shoes and wander through a world more realistic than reality.

We meet Liselle on the evening of a dinner party she is hosting after her husband’s decisive political defeat. (His name, beautifully, is Winn.) At the back of Liselle’s mind is Selena, a college girlfriend whose life veered in a sorrowful direction after their romance ended. Other episodes of history whirl through her brain: the time her son came home with green dreadlocks; the time she met her estranged father; the night of her own wedding.

But mostly she thinks of Selena. As the dinner progresses, we slip out of Liselle’s consciousness and into the mind of her ex, following Selena from college to a stay in a psychiatric hospital to an internship to a menial job, through one-night stands and conversations with co-workers and an episode of getting booked for disturbing the peace at a Starbucks.

Solomon has a way of taking class lines that are often invisible and turning them into one of those laser museum security systems that you see in heist movies: neon, treacherous, uncrossable. In the middle of Liselle’s party, a woman knocks at the door and asks if she can wash down the house’s windows for a few dollars. “It’s not a good time,” Liselle tells the woman. “I’m not begging. I work,” the woman replies, addressing the subtext rather than the text of Liselle’s remark. In the 30 seconds it takes to shoo the woman away, Liselle experiences a mental emergency. She feels guilty. She feels irritated. She recalls moments in which she herself “felt like a panhandler.”

Her thoughts always return to Selena. Where Liselle has scrambled up the socioeconomic ladder and now plays gracious hostess to the “menacingly dull” lawyers at Winn’s firm, Selena lives with her mother and works two jobs. Her primary duty is to maintain chemical stability; her routine consists of work, medication, therapy, peppermint tea, sleep, repeat. When Liselle calls and leaves a message with Selena’s mother, Selena’s carefully tended equilibrium is dashed.

Liselle’s call to Selena happens in the first few pages of the book, just before dinner begins, which is to say that we meet our protagonist at the precise moment her life becomes intolerable. What exactly the gesture triggers is revealed over the course of a novel so concise it reminded me of one of those wrinkle-free travel dresses that magically expands from a folded cube into a wearable garment. Solomon’s novel is a feat of engineering. It’s also a reverie, a riff on “Mrs. Dalloway” and a love story.