New People

June 19, 2017
Senna (Caucasia) returns to long-form fiction in a muddled third novel featuring a protagonist in search of her identity. It’s 1996 in slowly gentrifying New York, and 27-year-old Maria and her college sweetheart Khalil, both mixed-race, are planning their wedding. They’re also the stars of a new documentary called New People about interracial couples. But there’s a catch—one that grows comically large as the story progresses: Maria’s obsessed with a soft-spoken, brown-skinned poet whom she barely knows, but suspects is her soul mate. Her stalking takes on an air of implausibility as she sneaks into his apartment building, impersonates the next door neighbor’s nanny, and crawls into his open window while he’s not home—and those aren’t even the worst of her creepy maneuvers. Interspersed with her complaining about the state of her otherwise stable current relationship with Khalil are flashbacks to her disastrous dating life in college before she met and “saved” him from being the “token... cool black guy at the frat party”; discussions about racism and white privilege; remembrances of her adopted mother before she died from breast cancer at 49; and a side plot involving Maria’s attempts to finish her dissertation on the mass suicide at Jonestown. Significant themes and issues are touched upon here but unfortunately get lost before fully landing.

Starred review from May 15, 2017
Khalil and Maria, biracial Stanford graduates whose Martha's Vineyard wedding will be featured in the New York Times, hit a bump in the road when Maria develops a crush on another man.Khalil Mirsky is the dreadlocked, Hacky Sack-playing son of a Jewish man and an African-American woman, "the only black guy at the frat party--the Hootie in his Blowfish." Maria Pierce is so light that white people make racist jokes in front of her, thus suffering "that particular rage of the light-skinned individual," as her black adoptive mother puts it. From the moment they get together, Khalil and Maria are the "King and Queen of the Racially Nebulous Prom," their skin "the same shade of beige"--or as Khalil describes it to the woman filming them for a documentary called "New People," "a Woody Allen movie, with melanin." Maria is more cynical about their biracial fairy tale, their Brooklyn lifestyle, the future baby they'll name Indigo or Thelonious Mirsky-Pierce, "the messiah of Mulatto Nation." Her second thoughts take the form of an obsessive crush on a poet who is not a New Person, a "brown-skinned black boy with a shaved head...the body, the skin, the face that cabdrivers pretend not to see." Senna's (You Are Free, 2011, etc.) fearless novel is equal parts beguiling and disturbing, and nowhere more so than in a hilarious, ultimately terrifying series of events that begins when a tired white lady mistakes Maria for her nanny, Consuela, and leaves her in charge of her infant. Senna combines the clued-in status details you'd find in a New York magazine article with the narrative invention of big-league fiction. Every detail and subplot, including Maria's dissertation on the Jonestown massacre and her buried secret about a college prank gone awry, is resonant. A great book about race and a great book all around.!!!

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June 1, 2017

The protagonist of this well-constructed, brooding novel is a young woman of mixed race named Maria, the adopted daughter of a black woman who died an impoverished grad student while Maria herself was in college. Maria has always defiantly embraced her blackness and now is living the hipster life in New York, along with her fiance Khalil, a dreamboat who is part black, part Jewish, and has a darker-skinned, arrogant sister named Lisa. They are the New People, a generation for whom race ostensibly doesn't matter, but in fact they wear their racial awareness like stylish new clothes. Maria knows she's a phony, as a kid from poverty making it at Stanford--or as someone who identifies as black but doesn't look it--might feel like a fake. But there's something more sinister about Maria's recurring obsessions, duplicities, and poses, something despicable. Or maybe it's her own dissertation on the Jamestown Massacre that she's rushing to finish that is driving her crazy. VERDICT Senna's latest (Caucasia; Symptomatic) is a great read, both compelling and thoughtful. The narrative has a page-turning urgency, as Maria tumbles toward a disaster of her own making, while her musings on race shift between provocative and cynical. [See Prepub Alert, 2/27/17.]--Reba Leiding, emeritus, James Madison Univ. Lib., Harrisonburg, VA

Copyright 2017 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.

March 15, 2017

Life looks good for Maria, who's living in a black bohemian enclave in Brooklyn with her husband-to-be (they were King and Queen of the Racially Nebulous Prom) and pursuing her dissertation as he enjoys success during the first wave of dot-coms. So why is Maria daydreaming about a poet she barely knows, and what does this say about the pressures of race, class, and self-affirmation in contemporary America? From the author of the best-selling Caucasia, an Alex and Stephen Crane award winner and an IMPAC Dublin Literary Award finalist.

Copyright 2017 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.

Starred review from June 1, 2017

The protagonist of this well-constructed, brooding novel is a young woman of mixed race named Maria, the adopted daughter of a black woman who died an impoverished grad student while Maria herself was in college. Maria has always defiantly embraced her blackness and now is living the hipster life in New York, along with her fiance Khalil, a dreamboat who is part black, part Jewish, and has a darker-skinned, arrogant sister named Lisa. They are the New People, a generation for whom race ostensibly doesn't matter, but in fact they wear their racial awareness like stylish new clothes. Maria knows she's a phony, as a kid from poverty making it at Stanford--or as someone who identifies as black but doesn't look it--might feel like a fake. But there's something more sinister about Maria's recurring obsessions, duplicities, and poses, something despicable. Or maybe it's her own dissertation on the Jamestown Massacre that she's rushing to finish that is driving her crazy. VERDICT Senna's latest (Caucasia; Symptomatic) is a great read, both compelling and thoughtful. The narrative has a page-turning urgency, as Maria tumbles toward a disaster of her own making, while her musings on race shift between provocative and cynical. [See Prepub Alert, 2/27/17.]--Reba Leiding, emeritus, James Madison Univ. Lib., Harrisonburg, VA

Copyright 2017 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.