Why did I get this book?
The reviews have been stellar. I’m already very interested in Black memoir and autofiction as a genre; that this is also set in Philadelphia and dwells frequently on the workings of geeky popular culture in the interior life of a young boy were additional reasons.
Is it what I thought it was?
I had no strong preconceptions except for what the reviews primed me to expect, and it more than fulfilled my expectations.
What continuing uses might I have for it?
I don’t know that I’m the person to teach the book, but it sure as hell belongs in as many syllabi as have room for it. (I have taught Kiese Laymon’s Heavy, which this feels complicatedly adjacent to in some ways, and it was a high-wire act pedagogically.) I’d urgently recommend it to many of my colleagues and friends.
Quotes
So many amazing passages, but a lot of them need to remain situated in the text. I will quote the fantastic opening, since I’m going to say a bit more about it.
“Of all the protagonists in this story—both real and imagined—just Joey, the boy, owned an Easy-Bake Oven. Owned it the way his grandfather, Popop, owned sound, like the sound of Joey’s name sliding out of smoke-black lips: ‘Joy!’ he always said, ‘Joy! Come here!’ Joey was timid, to put it nicely; and the Oven was purchased, with the help of Capital One, for his little sister, Mika, anyway. Joey had convinced Mike that she wanted one, and therefore, at seven, he received a gift that, through Popop’s eyes, sat scandalous in the lap of his little black man in training. But Joey used it to make cheesecake, red velvet cupcakes, blackened salmon, fried chicken, and Chilean sea bass with dirty rice. The oven itself was tiny and pink, sitting on a fold-out dinner tray, purchased from the Dollar General just three blocks away.”
Commentary, asides, loose thoughts, unfair complaints
There are certain openings to books—fiction, memoir, nonfiction—that make me feel compelled to go on to the end regardless of what awaits. Tsitsi Dangarembga’s Nervous Conditions opens, “I was not sorry when my brother died” and that was that, I knew I was going to really read it, not just dutifully study it. The opening to Neal Stephenson’s Snow Crash was like watching some amazing magic trick that involved juggling, flaming swords and being lowered into a glass tank in a straightjacket all at once. Sink is in that company—even though the opening tempts you to think this will be a gentler or more whimsical book than it turns out to be. (The next bit after the Easy-Bake Oven is about Joey’s black notebook, which provides a clearer picture of the hard road ahead.)
This is one of the best books I’ve read for helping me to think about the commandment “only connect”, about the ways that many of us—especially comfortable educated white readers—desperately want to use stories, memoirs, journalism, to work towards some universal understanding, some claim of insight into the lives of others and into our own. More than anything, it helped me to understand why it’s so desperately important to defer, delay, or stall the instant impulse to say “oh, wow, that’s just like me” or “oh, man, I know what that’s like”. Not to refuse the impulse altogether, not to piously insist that Sink is about a life that I cannot understand and have no point of connection to. It’s as bad to insist on radical alterity as it is easy universality—there’d be no point to anybody reading anybody’s memoir unless it was your spiritual and material doppleganger if that were so. But the book is so forceful about the material conditions of life in a violent, difficult, impoverished Black household in Philadelphia and so distinctive in its mix of unsentimental description of squalor and its lavish exploration of idiosyncratically imaginative yearnings for other places, other possibilities, other bodies, that all of that has just got to come first, and all of that is as far from my life as the Moon (and yet as close as ten minutes away). Eventually I can wend my way to recalling getting my face scraped along a chain-link fence every time I wasn’t fast enough in dodging the bullies after school or remembering the psycho kid in the neighborhood who’d show a knife and talk about skinning me alive one of these days, and think about how comic-books and science-fiction and video games were a wall against misery, and catching snakes a fascination, but that mostly serves as a reminder that for all of us, the simultaneities in this society in our lives and times are weak ties; the strong forces that take hold of us are viciously unequal and a harsh barrier to easy assertions of oh-I-know-what-that’s-like.
In a different vein, on the same subject, I really don’t know quite how to feel in reading something like Sink or Laymon’s Heavy. I don’t know why sometimes this sort of work, regardless of who the author is, slides into something that feels like something too much (even when that something’s reality)—I’m reminded a bit of the debate over the film Precious, which some critics saw as prurient and at least one saw as deliberate camp rather than social realism. It’s maybe about who is positioned as the envisioned audience; Sink doesn’t cross a line because it doesn’t feel written for a kind of white spectatorship; it’s not a sociological or diagrammatic life, but instead is mapping an intimate and largely interior space that is often no bigger than Joey’s house. But it’s another set of emotions that I feel I have to reign in and manage as I read—to interrupt quick moves to pity and revulsion, but not so far that I end up unable to lock into the fact that the child protagonist’s entire life is driven by self-pity, loathing for others, and revulsion at his circumstances—a reader can’t or shouldn’t talk themselves into piously or primly refusing to feel within the structure of feeling that is on every page of a book.
Near the end, in fact, the book speaks right at my anxieties as a reader: “The meanest boys you’ve encountered all have mommies and sometimes even daddies who care about them…As you and Terrell see it, these boys are spoiled children, escaping a decent life, and brutalizing, for no other reason than the budding desire to be cool and independent in a new flock or maybe avoid some fucking chores, while you and Terrell are forced to dodge their assaults and hide out in the basement of your white friend’s house. Or at least that’s what you tell yourself. You are jealous because these are the boys who will have ethnographies written about them, documentaries and television programs, who are calculated as problems, and therefore, seen. You are jealous because they have the confidence to exist, albeit if only toward redemption, which they will be offered again and again, despite everything.” Here you can really see Thomas saying: don’t try to turn this life into sociology; there’s a kind of kinship here with Saidiya Hartman’s Wayward Lives, Beautiful Experiments and how it tries to rescue Black individuality from sociology, interiority from typification, personal suffering from policy. But therefore also this is about the complicated cultural space where Black authors try to work out a conversation about the limits of accepting blackness as it is defined by white liberals and progressives who are constantly needing to have something they can help, some fixed landscape of imagined intervention, while not having that conversation appropriated by some other group of white readers who just want to reconsign Black perspectives to the margins and be done with them altogether.
The simplest thing you can say about the book, however, is that it is just an astonishing work of literary craft. Here I have to quote Kiese Laymon’s blurb on the back cover: “It is criminal and absolutely delicious that Sink is a literary debut.” That pretty well says it all.