BookBrowse Reviews Witness by Jamel Brinkley

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Expansive and intimate episodes of Black life in an evolving New York. Brinkley's stories are layered with so many turns and noticings that they take on the curious shape and emotional impact of reality.

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In his second short story collection Witness, Jamel Brinkley takes surprising but deeply resonant paths to explore how memory, community, and change affect his cast of Black New Yorkers. Inspired by the artists and everyday people who "recognize the presence and power of what haunts us," Brinkley's writing has all the peculiarity and interconnectedness that make ghost stories moving.

The three epigraphs to the collection form a perfect introduction to the kind of subtlety Brinkley enjoys. Each conceptualizes witnessing in a slightly different way: James Baldwin writing, "the line which separates a witness from an actor is a very thin line indeed;" Robert Stone implying that "identifying and acting upon what's right" go hand in hand; and Gina Berriault's exhortation "Be an eyewitness to this too…" emphasizing physical presence. Witnessing, we're shown, is as variable an act (or a prerequisite for an act) as the circumstances that demand it. It naturally follows that the titular last story is not what the reader will probably expect, which makes it all the more mind-expanding.

Nor does the first use of the word "witness" approach the question of what witnessing means directly: "seeing Headass, genuinely taking notice of him, really witnessing him rooted there in that playpen of dung, seemed to bind us in a way we hadn't been bound in months." The fact that a passage this oblique is so poignant in context is a testament to why Witness is a stunning work. The quote is from the opening story "Blessed Deliverance," which is about the inevitable dissolution of a high school friend group as senior year approaches. It's also about a locally known, mentally ill homeless man called Headass, who gets hired (but not paid) by two patronizing white people running a rabbit and chinchilla store on a site once occupied by a storefront church. In the end, the man given the name Headass by the kids' uncles and older cousins who grew up with him (as the narrator acknowledges regretfully) engages in a vaguely defiant act, and the neighborhood of Bed-Stuy rallies around him without knowing exactly what for. Though life has pulled the friends apart, as long as they are part of the cheering crowd, "we could be part of another thing, a large and incoherent body that had plenty to say and no need to justify itself."

"Blessed Deliverance" not only captures the uncanny aspects of gentrification and the complex inner workings of young relationships, but also the humiliation of unemployment, the sting of unrequited affection, the notion of cultural memory as opposed to the statistical record, finding escape in the obliteration of the self, and on and on. There is the sense that Brinkley sets up these stories without knowing where they will wind up, because they take so many turns and cover so much fertile ground. Yet in most cases, the themes fit together like mosaic tiles. The benefit of creating nuanced characters in realistic, fraught situations is that wherever they decide to go, meaning will follow.

While individual moments are well-observed and full of empathy and life—like the description of the high schoolers walking side by side down the street "incandescent with jokes and laughter, five lit bulbs on a string"—each story is greater than the sum of its parts. They build and build to the point that they defy categorization. In "The Let-Out," a sixteen-year-old trying to hit on women exiting a museum ends up being picked up himself by someone who can fill a missing gap in his family's past. "Sahar" is about a hotel room service server who keeps receiving kind notes from the same food app delivery person (see Beyond the Book) and starts writing long letters in reply in which she pours her heart out about her strained marriage and the way apps are eliminating jobs like hers. The protagonist of "Comfort" has been living in a drunken haze since her brother was murdered by a cop who got off with a mere demotion. She often wonders about the cop's wife, how she could possibly stand by an obvious killer.

Brinkley's style is a worthy vehicle for his wide-ranging sensibility, sliding from conversational play ("headassery" describes Headass' awkward behavior) to casual insight ("she was playing dumb by playing smart") to nerdy logophilia: when his mother dismisses a houseplant as artificial, the child in "That Particular Sunday" understands the word "in Latin sense, a way of praising the tree as a work of art." The author uses language with as much precision, personality, and versatility as a well-rounded person's inner voice to state deep truths in the most devastating clarity: "this is what life did, plain and simple, nothing profound so maybe don't worry too much. It pulled bodies apart."

Witness offers the sort of spiritual-intellectual gratification that is unique to the art of literature. More than one story in this collection ends with a character achieving catharsis by discovering personal writing—self-witnessing, as it were. Brinkley delivers wisdom about people in charged relationships (parental, romantic, racial) and ideas in charged relations (artistic, economic, political) through stories that continuously make the reader wonder both what will happen next and what is even happening. Some plots cohere better than others, but maybe that's a consequence of Brinkley always trying to depict feelings that are hard to explain straightforwardly. Witness makes us "genuinely take notice" of ourselves and others in fresh and empathetic ways.

This review was originally published in The BookBrowse Review in August 2023, and has been updated for the September 2024 edition. Click here to go to this issue.