Letting stories’ surprises sneak up on him
Jamel Brinkley refers to novelist E.L. Doctorow when speaking about his writing process — how it can be like driving at night, when the road is illuminated only by the limited vision of a car’s headlights.
“I don’t want to know how it ends until I’m close to the ending. That’s probably the reason why I write so slowly,” Brinkley says. “I kind of want to start with whatever the thing is — a memory, a piece of dialogue, a character, a place — and then just start asking a bunch of questions. The answers I come up with to those questions will lead me from sentence to sentence.”
Brinkley writes with the surprises coming to him along the way, rather than writing with some notion of a narrative hook already in mind. Yet, the Brooklyn and Bronx-bred writer maintains an assured control over the turns in the road as they arrive within the short stories of his stunning debut book, “A Lucky Man.” Whatever happens unexpectedly in the stories never feel like sensational twists.
His characters, primarily black men in Brooklyn or the Bronx, are often clawing in a sort of quiet desperation or hope, or hopelessness. Full of character-driven slow burners — a college house party that inches toward an unsettling sexual encounter; two fatherless boys undergoing an almost spiritual transformation during a color-soaked parade; a haunted past returns during a high school reunion — the stories hit with a silent thunder that reverberates within you long after you’ve finished them.
The pitch-perfect poise throughout can feel precocious for a debut work from a writer who only decided to make a go of writing in the last handful of years. But at 42, Brinkley credits a later-life start.
“For me, I think I felt like, you know what, I finally got here. I finally got to the point where I’m taking that writing seriously, so what’s the rush now? What’s the point of bulldozing my way?”
There is a sense of patient, tender care given to his characters that are drawn from his own life.
“These are the men that I’ve seen,” Brinkley says, “that I’ve grown up with, that I’ve been friends with, that I’ve been.”
His protagonists are black men complicated by fatherhood or family or race, and all grappling with the larger through line coursing within the collection: “black masculinity — what that means, how much of masculinity is a performance, how much of it is you feeling sort of pressed to be a certain way versus what the possibilities of what masculinity are.”
The stories come out of what Brinkley describes as the gap within one’s sense of self.
“I just remember being very young and in certain circumstances, feeling very much at home in the idea of being a straight black male — maybe at home with family or friends — and other moments feeling like, well, I don’t fit those expectations at all,” Brinkley says.
In this confusion, Brinkley reveals the complexity and dimension of his characters — an act of writing that bears a personal responsibility “because of the ways that black characters and characters of color have been rendered in a lot of literature, and because of the way that black people and people of color are treated and represented in life.”
Yet in the resulting intimate detail, we can still never get a firm hold of these individuals, just as they can never get a hold of themselves — reading Brinkley’s stories often have the effect of feeling wondrously or heartbreakingly confounded by the end, as if we don’t know where we’ve been taken, only that we want to continue following along.