Jamel Brinkley’s 2019 debut short story collection, A Lucky Man, announced an important new voice in anglophone fiction, a technically skilled storyteller with a particular talent for depicting the obscure nuances of interpersonal relationships. Recriminations, resentments and regrets are the order of the day in the 10 distinctly downbeat tales comprising his new collection, Witness. The narrator of one story, Arrows, sets the tone when he muses that the world is made up of two sorts of people: those who are able to recover from traumas, and those who “tend to become ghosts”. “Stuck on something that happened to them, or on an obsession, they’re the ones who can’t accept people’s inevitably forward movement through the entanglements of time.” Many of the characters here belong firmly in the latter category.
In The Let-Out, a young man is befriended by an older woman who had once been romantically involved with his estranged father. He is plunged into doleful reminiscence: “What I remember most from those years aren’t images or events, but sensations, feelings of anger, aggression, and obstinacy … ” Comfort tells of a Black woman stuck in an alcoholic, grief-stricken rut, four years on from her brother’s death at the hands of a white police officer. She has become obsessed with the officer’s family, stalking them online. The narrator of Sahar embarks on a bizarre one-way correspondence with a driver from a fast food delivery app, writing her a series of increasingly lengthy notes in which she offloads about her late husband while also ruminating on gentrification and the precariousness of gig economy work. She signs off one missive: “I hope you won’t think I’m loony tunes.”
