How Do You Write a Novel About a White Person’s Racial Awakening?

David Greenfeld, the narrator of the novel “Green,” by Sam
Graham-Felsen, introduces himself as “the white boy at the Martin Luther
King Middle.” At least, he’s the most glaringly white. (His competition,
Kev, is swarthy and lacks David’s air of fragility.) He is the scion of
Harvard-educated hippies with social-justice leanings and a vegetable
garden down their block, in the Jamaica Plain neighborhood of Boston
(where Graham-Felsen also grew up). His pastimes include coveting street
gear, scheming to make money, and trying not to masturbate. He’s a
charming kid, a mix of tough, clueless, and tender, like many a delicate
Jewish son aspiring to machismo. (Desperate to leave a sleepover before
his host turns on “A Nightmare on Elm Street,” David resolves “to jab my
fingers down my throat and make myself yack.”) He is also a social
outcast. His classmates, who are predominantly black and Latino, pick on
him gleefully; one pulls a knife. Sanctuary comes in the form of Marlon,
or Mar, a nerdy eleven-year-old from the projects who shares David’s
obsession with the perennially embarrassing Celtics.

The full range of Mar’s personality feels deliberately withheld; this is
partly owing to the inherent limitations of having a sixth-grade
narrator, especially one cocooned by white privilege. More
interestingly, there is an element of auto-critique in the way “Green” leaves Mar mysterious, as if this racism-haunted book (a sort of
projection of the narrator’s white guilt) did not quite deserve a Mar.
Yet Graham-Felsen’s choice to veil or seal off his black characters
can’t help but appear somewhat convenient, even as the novel marks out
white solipsism as one of its themes. Here is a story of a white
person’s burgeoning racial consciousness, drawn powerfully from what is
likely a white writer’s experience of failing (at least at first) to
fully apprehend others’ experiences. The reader will either tolerate
this premise, or not.

“Green” shares many of the preoccupations of the 2003 novel “Fortress of
Solitude”; like Jonathan Lethem before him, Graham-Felsen seems
fascinated by the opposition of the natural and the constructed. (His
title evokes, among other associations, the lush arboretum where Mar and
David hang out, a kind of prelapsarian refuge.) The language that David
has on hand is an awkward but endearing hip-hop patois, something he
appears to have absorbed by default, like the ability to “spit flow”
(another of his talents), or the idea that “fiending” on white girls is
“corny.” David’s account of a basketball game with a neighborhood teen:
“He’s nasty, and we’re vibing. We smoke Kev and Simon eleven to four and
they bounce to the bodega to cop some Gatorades.” Flirting with
linguistic appropriation, David mostly sounds lonely, swimming through a
culture that does not belong to him. (Later, the book name-checks
Huckleberry Finn, another slangy literary outsider.)

“Green” is also deeply interested in authenticity. While David is
frantic to project strength, Mar—who “looks pretty soft,” David thinks,
with his “creased khakis, pilled-up flannel, boxy black shoes and a
short unkempt flattop”—allows his sensitivity to shine through. The
quiet kid with the unsteady home life possesses a showstopping voice;
at David’s urging, he joins a musical-theatre program attended mostly by
affluent white students. Mar’s music spills out from some hidden place
inside him. David prefers to rap, conjoining rhymes like armor. It’s as
if, in the boys’ respective musical modes, the book has found a figure
for Mar’s embrace of vulnerability, and David’s distrust of it.

Before he turned to fiction, Graham-Felsen served as the head blogger
for Barack Obama’s first Presidential campaign. “Green” bears the traces
of that past; in places, the book enshrines a late-2008 idealism. At one
point, the director of Mar and David’s theatre program leads students in
a “pass the pulse” exercise; what the young actors are feeling, the
older man says, “is unison. It’s you disappearing into we. Every
performance lives or dies on unison or the lack of it.” This is a
lovely vision, but it also hints at a troubling aspect of the book.
“Green” excels at capturing the insidious ways prejudice works through
people—in a store owner’s guarded interactions with Mar, in thoughts
David doesn’t want to think. But the book sometimes seems to lose sight
of the fact that racism is about more than feelings. Although characters
pay lip service to rigged or broken systems, although racism is
presented as a force that shapes not only relationships but outcomes,
most of the novel’s data points are swept up into a different argument,
about how human beings wrong each other, shattering their proper unison.
In this sense, the empathy and sensitivity that is so clearly a strength
of Graham-Felsen’s is also a weakness, inclining him to exhaust most of
his considerable descriptive powers on the pain of ostracization, of
lost connection.

The authorial sin here is not malice or even incomprehension—more like
a kind of distraction, a straying of focus. And the consequence is a
coming-of-age tale of uncommon sweetness and feeling that does not
always seem in total command of the difficult ideas it grapples with.
One can’t quite figure out the parameters of the knowledge that David
awakens into. Is it that racism exists? That it is bad, regardless of
the direction in which it flows? Or is it that rejection from the black
world does not equate, in terms of opportunity and safety, to exile from
the white world? On the first day of school, David is ejected from the
“prestigious real estate” at the back of the bus to the “White Bitch
Bench” at the front. This is a richly suggestive moment, full of
complicated allusions to the Civil Rights movement. David, naturally,
feels angry and humiliated. But, by the end of the novel, the reader
isn’t sure whether an older, wiser David would react any differently to
his banishment. After the racial self-reckoning that Mar inspires, does
the narrator understand that the front of the bus remains a more
desirable place to be?

Consider a beautiful passage in which David looks
at the piles of shoes displayed at the Holocaust Museum in Washington,
D.C. Imagining the abasement of the Jews stripped by the Nazis, the
narrator reaches for the same language and imagery he used to recount
one of the more striking set pieces in the book: when he is robbed by a
black kid and forced to remove his pants. The comparison scans as
well-intentioned but puzzling. According to the logic of the rest of the
novel, Graham-Felsen is arguing against racial hatred. But why would the
writer make this point in such a way, with the role of the Nazi played
by a black teen-ager? While the moment elicits admiration for the
complexity and ambition of what Graham-Felsen is attempting, a reader is
left feeling queasy, as if the novel had shaken free of its authorial
reins and started galloping toward the cliff’s edge.

In a bildungsroman, the person who catalyzes the
main character’s moral and intellectual development often feels marked
by fate. David’s relationship with Mar accelerates his coming of age,
especially his dawning awareness of race and racism, but does not
survive it. The narrator wins a spot at Boston Latin, the élite public
school seen by the other characters as a launchpad to Harvard. His
friend doesn’t. The two drift apart. In the end, David has the luxury of
being “green,” with all the Gatsbyesque connotations of dreaming and
ascension the word implies. Mar can only ever be black.