The Chinaberry Tree

This is a book with something to say and the nerve to say it without flinching. Saintjones builds a pilgrimage structure from the first chapter: a white narrator, Arnold, drinking his way through three years of other people's stories in The Chinaberry Tree Bar, collecting lives like "an imperialistic anthropologist... siphon[ing] their experiences like an addict snorting cocaine, hopelessly transactional." The book's central question, Bo Willie's "Our people?", is asked in the opening pages and answered only at the end, and the answer is earned by the book's own accumulated evidence.

What I admire is how the interior tales feed that question. Peter's Spring Street, a community of "forgotten children prodded to sing old songs in a new land," paid for "with a heaping spoonful of amnesia," is the quiet center of the book. Mr. Upchurch's death turns Papa's faith to blasphemy in the dark, and the rhythm of the headboard against the wall says the rest. Joseph's blues, sung to a room of men who had just told him he hadn't suffered enough, is a genuinely stunning set piece. The Vietnamese woman's chinaberry parable, "I be whore in Vietnam, but not nigger in America," delivers the title's meaning with real sting.

The book's most daring move is its refusal to flatter its narrator. Ethel's rebuke, "If sniffing underwear makes me such a bad person, what does it make of you?", is exact, and the Bo Willie confrontation, in which Arnold learns that being tolerated is not the same as belonging, is among the best scenes in the manuscript.

The prose is maximalist and sometimes overreaches; the Egyptian and biblical apparatus can crowd the human moments. But the book's moral seriousness, and its willingness to implicate everyone in the room, including its author's own narrator, earns this recognition for Theme & Substance.