‘World’ stories are bleak and beautiful
“The World Doesn’t Require You” (Liveright, 384 pp., ★★★g), a bleak and beautiful collection of short stories, is the second book by Rion Amilcar Scott, winner of the prestigious PEN/Robert W. Bingham Prize for Debut Fiction for 2016’s “Insurrections.” Set in fictional Cross River, Maryland, the stories in both collections depict life in the aftermath of America’s only successful slave revolt, the “Great Insurrection.”
This remarkable literary project, with its echoes of William Faulkner’s Yoknapatawpha County, or more recently Jesmyn Ward’s Bois Sauvage, makes use of place as a deeply significant factor in characters’ lives. The Southern and AfricanAmerican Cross River residents grapple with their ancestors’ past triumph, and their own present horror when racism manifests as memory, discrimination, violence.
Scott’s stories often are told in first person, from the point of view of men whose different voices and different eras come to form a chorus of black life in Cross River. Dialogue is rendered without quotation marks, a technique that leads to fluent slippage between what the characters think and what they say.
In one story, a narrator’s college friend returns years later with a dissertation analyzing a childhood doorknock prank as a cultural product of slave escape plans. As the two men revisit their childish joke, the narrator becomes subsumed in the game despite increasing tensions and consequences. In another story, “Numbers,” a crime family underling in 1918 tries to save himself and his murderous boss, from an endless cycle of killing: “This damn compassion,” he thinks. “This damn empathy.” “Rolling in My SixFo’” starts as a road trip and descends into a nightmarish blur of druggy surrealism and fun-house-mirror racism.
The collection’s standout, which closes the book, is a novella titled “Special Topics in Loneliness Studies,” a piece about two professors, their job travails at Freedman’s University, their love lives and their shifting understanding of what it means to be a teacher. Here, Scott uses a hybrid of narrative forms – emails, assignments, footnotes, slide shows, oral history – to convey the story of these two men as well as a sense of their fragmented lived experiences. It’s a risk-filled contemporary strategy that pays off in an emotionally resonant ending that also echoes themes of the collection as a whole.
Reading “The World Doesn’t Require You” is an immersive, slightly disorienting experience. The book’s stories change modes, one after another – realism to science-fiction to horror and back, leaving readers captivated but also intentionally off balance. Painful and shocking moments of racism and violence occur next to scenes of tenderness and humor.
Scott demonstrates the skill and long-range vision of a writer we need right now. “The World Doesn’t Require You” requires a commitment from readers, one that will be greatly repaid in literary satisfaction.