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Book Reviewed by:From the bestselling author of Caucasia, a subversive and engrossing novel of race, class and manners in contemporary America.
As the twentieth century draws to a close, Maria is at the start of a life she never thought possible. She and Khalil, her college sweetheart, are planning their wedding. They are the perfect couple, "King and Queen of the Racially Nebulous Prom." Their skin is the same shade of beige. They live together in a black bohemian enclave in Brooklyn, where Khalil is riding the wave of the first dot-com boom and Maria is plugging away at her dissertation, on the Jonestown massacre. They've even landed a starring role in a documentary about "new people" like them, who are blurring the old boundaries as a brave new era dawns. Everything Maria knows she should want lies before her - yet she can't stop daydreaming about another man, a poet she barely knows. As fantasy escalates to fixation, it dredges up secrets from the past and threatens to unravel not only Maria's perfect new life but her very persona.
Heartbreaking and darkly comic, New People is a bold and unfettered page-turner that challenges our every assumption about how we define one another, and ourselves.
At times, the glimpses into Maria's inner thoughts take readers to some pretty dark and uncomfortable places that will compel readers to confront their own assumptions about race and identity. Readers who pick up New People in 2017, more than twenty years after its setting, will recognize both how much Brooklyn, its residents, and the country as a whole have continued to evolve over the intervening decades and how relevant the issues raised in its pages — from gentrification and the creative economy to, more broadly, issues of race and identity — still remain...continued
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(Reviewed by Norah Piehl).
In New People, Maria's dissertation focuses on the Jonestown settlement in Guyana and on the massacre that resulted in the death of some 900 men, women, and children from poisoning on November 18, 1975. Jonestown was developed, and sold to believers, as a sort of utopian community led by Jim Jones, who founded the People's Temple in Indianapolis in the 1950s. This Christian sect preached a message of inclusion, equality, and anti-racism, and consequently attracted many African Americans — though Jones himself was white. The settlement's formal name was The People's Temple Agricultural Project.
Eventually, former People's Temple members and the families of current ones began to alert authorities that the group was exhibiting cult...
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I stayed up way later than planned to finish New People, Danzy Senna's riveting, take-no-prisoners, dystopic dream of a novel. More scorcher than satire, New People loads identity, race, despair, and desire into a blender then hits high. Get ready to stay up late, to be propelled, pricked, and haunted.
