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But Escoffery’s protagonists, though resourceful, can’t accomplish the impossible nor do they sacrifice themselves for the reader’s sentimental education. Literature abounds with characters who jury-rig salvation out of scraps. Still, there’s a difference between hope and grace. His technical exuberance stands in stark contrast to his subject matter, which can feel hopeless, a litany of the cruelties that people in straitened circumstances visit upon one another. The book feels thrillingly free, and Escoffery, forty-one, has caught the publishing world’s attention: in 2020, he won the Plimpton Prize for Fiction, a fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts, and a National Magazine Award. There’s peacocking humor, capers, and passages of shuddering eroticism. One tale unfolds in Jamaican patois another dips in and out of Black American idioms. The eight stories in “If I Survive You” employ the first, second, and third person, as well as the past, present, and future tense.

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As Trelawny notes, his fellow-Yankees “break into free association, as if they’d been tossed a rap cypher: Bob Marley, irie, ganja, poor people, Sandals, ’ey mon! ”Įscoffery’s fiction is marked by ingenuity. And don’t get them started on Jamaica itself. In Trelawny’s experience, people routinely misapprehend what it’s like to live in poverty, or to be Jamaican American. The best part of being employed, Trelawny insists, isn’t “food security, the dignity of work, or the promise of upward mobility.” It’s having regular access to a toilet on which to “unload your twisted, clogged-up colon without having to fake like you’re planning to buy that Double McFuckery with fries.” The book, about an immigrant family struggling to make ends meet, delights in mocking the trope of an immigrant family struggling to make ends meet.

Escoffery offers vivid glimpses of the “nouveau hobo class”: to freshen up for a job interview, Trelawny fills a fast-food ketchup cup with hand soap and takes it to a beach shower. Here is a tale about deprivation which stomps on the delicate vessel of the trauma plot. “I could live like a fully formed twenty-first-century North American human,” he says.

“Let me just put that out there.” But if Trelawny can confirm Carlos’s undisclosed income stream he might get a promotion, which would mean moving out of his car and renting his own apartment. “I’ve always liked Carlos,” Trelawny says. As the action begins, Trelawny’s most elusive quarry is an energetic old-timer named Carlos, who may or may not be concealing the fact that he works at Walgreens. The downsides include anonymous notes, “penciled in lowercase letters,” that invite him to die. The job is rewarding: free parking, good vending machines. I wrangle them, force them into stiff, scratchy chairs before interrogating them.” Trelawny works in Miami, in a federally subsidized senior-housing complex, where he gathers intel on residents that would justify raising their rent. Trelawny, the narrator of one of the linked stories in “If I Survive You” (Farrar, Straus & Giroux), a ravishing début by Jonathan Escoffery, introduces himself by explaining, “I hunt elderly people.