The Talented Ribkins

June 26, 2017
Blending the superhuman with the civil rights movement, this debut novel is an ambitious, if uneven, attempt to explore new dimensions of the struggle for racial justice. Johnny Ribkins—a 72-year-old with an uncanny talent for making maps of any place, whether he’s ever seen it or not—has five days to pay a debt to a Florida crime boss. He sets out on a whirlwind tour of the state to dig up all the secret caches of money he’d planted decades earlier, when the Justice Committee—the organization he founded with similarly gifted family members and friends to protect black activists in the ’60s—was dissolving. The ideals that animated the Justice Committee feel long gone: after his dream of making “more theoretical” maps that would chart not just space but “actual corridors of power” failed, Johnny turned to facilitating burglaries using his blueprints. Johnny’s lightning-quick friend Flash is solely focused on getting his sprinter son to the Olympics, while Johnny’s cousin Simone, able to “make people think they were in the presence of the most beautiful woman they’d ever seen,” has used her power to seduce and marry a wealthy judge. The mix of lofty ideals, uncanny skills, and human frailty Hubbard invokes is compelling, but the debt-repayment plot brings with it ever more convoluted revelations about Johnny’s past. Amid these ponderous (and often repetitive) historical detours, Hubbard’s unique conceit never quite becomes the provocative take on race relations it aspires to be.

Starred review from June 15, 2017
Hubbard shrewdly molds the pop-culture mythology of the comic-book superhero team into a magical-realist metaphor for African-American struggles since the real-life heroic battle against segregation in the middle of the 20th century.You've heard of the Justice League? Meet the Justice Committee, an extended family of black crusaders who became legendary for using their extraordinary powers to protect leaders, activists, and their brothers and sisters during the 1960s civil rights movement. When this crafty and wistful debut novel opens in present-day Florida, the committee's surviving members are scattered about, and one in particular, 72-year-old Johnny Ribkins, seems lost and at loose ends. Which is ironic since Johnny's special gift is being able to draw precise maps of places he's never been. (It came in handy when black drivers tried to make their ways safely through the racially segregated South.) But after the committee members drifted apart, Johnny and his brother, Franklin, whose natural wall-climbing skills rivaled those of Spider-Man, merged their talents for high-scale larceny. After Franklin's untimely death, Johnny jump-starts his cartography gifts to track down buried loot from all their varied heists so he can pay off his debt to a shady real estate mogul. Accompanying Johnny in an antique Thunderbird she characterizes as "junky" is his moody teenage niece, Eloise, who's been showing off some of her own inherited uncanniness by being able to catch any object thrown at her. With a pair of thugs shadowing them, Johnny and Eloise stop at various points in the Sunshine State, where they meet, among other relatives, Cousin Bertrand, nicknamed "Captain Dynamite" because he could "spit firecrackers"; another speedy, magnetic cousin known (of course) as "Flash"; and yet another nicknamed "The Hammer" because while her left hand looks normal, her right hand...you can probably guess the rest. With each rueful confrontation with people and places of his past, Johnny comes to grips with lost resolutions, squandered opportunities, and the complex history of a family that began with a patriarch whose superb sense of smell made him "The Rib King." Hubbard weaves this narrative with prodigious skill and compelling warmth. You anticipate a movie while wondering if any movie could do this fascinating family...well, justice. To describe this novel, as someone inevitably will, as Song of Solomon reimagined as a Marvel Comics franchise is to shortchange its cleverness and audacity.

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