“God’s Caravan”
by Tiphanie Yanique
from the November 4, 2019 issue of The New Yorker
I have seen Tiphanie Yanique’s name (in 2010 the National Book Foundation named her in their list of “5 Under 35”), but I don’t know her work and had to look up what she’s done. It looks like she was known first for her poetry and then started publishing short fiction in the mid-2000s. Her debut collection of stories is How to Escape from a Leper Colony, which came out in 2010. Her debut novel, Land of Love and Drowning, came out a few years later in 2014. From what I can see, “God’s Caravan” is a new short story and not part of a forthcoming novel.
It’s always a great opportunity to get to know someone new, and I think this one looks very good. It starts by introducing us to a young boy named Earl Lovett. He’s about to be in the midst of a religious revival:
The boys were crouched in the dirt, the marbles pinging between them. Earl Lovett’s biggie oily marble was blue and white, like the earth seen from the heavens. He’d already won twenty marbles by the time he noticed the music. Back home in Ellenwood, there was always singing or music playing. All day, every day. The music was constant noise for Earl, something easy for him to relegate to the back of his mind. So his marbles smashed straight while the other boys’ jigged. Even Earl’s cousin, Brent, who had taught him to pitch that summer, couldn’t keep up with Earl’s streak. He’d gotten so good, he wondered if he could grow up to be a marble player. His father was always going on about finding a trade.
Please feel free to comment on the story below. And, of course, if you know more of Yanique’s work, please let us know how you liked it.
I really enjoyed the story (I listened to Yanique reading it on the podcast). It starts slow, and slowly builds, adding layers of complexity as you move along. With small details you get quick deepening of the characters, Brent with the Rubik’s cube, the Dodge van, Earl’s memories, the marbles in his pocket, Pop and the cane. She does a lot with that. The themes are wonderful: finding identity and self, navigating family, living at the margins, prophetic tradition and its place in the world… The more I listened the more “literary” I kept thinking the story might be, in the sense that I could feel myself making a lot of connections to other works of literature. I guess all this is the poetry background coming through?
Read Yanique’s book How to Escape a Leper Colony nine years ago. Thought there was promise there. I didn’t feel like she was just an identity politics flash in the pan. Graywolf is a legit indie press and Yanique’s invocations of the Caribbean didn’t feel like a cynical or PC presentation.
Here she moves the setting to the American south in the 1990s, an era when poor boys still played marbles and fiddled with Rubik’s Cubes, and overall it’s a bit earnest, but a winning little tale by the end. At times she gets caught up in the trappings of realism, and of trying to fully inhabit a male and a child of 8 or 9, although the Caribbean origins of Earl’s family are properly played.
“like the earth seen from the heavens” in the second line is not a welcome metaphor; where is the New Yorker’s editing staff to pluck out this tired cliché?
“punk as any eight-year-old” later on feels out of place as well
Earl’s father’s neurodivergence being evidence of lunacy, especially in that era, is well-portrayed. I like the idea that spraying your house with bug repellent for protection is about as effective as spraying it with a white Jesus for protection of your black family in the American south. Religious ecstasy, madness, schizophrenia; all just different vessels for mania. The picture of the girlfriend on the mantle is a nice touch. And Earl inheriting a bit of his father’s schism through a second identity, Fly, is deft as well.
Earl’s sharing masturbation and marijuana with the older cousin was well-rendered.
The sex and religion conflation had potential but I think she needed to go further with it. Philip Roth’s “The Conversion of the Jews” is hard to avoid thinking about when reading this, and I found myself wishing for his level of sentence mastery and sexual provocation. Yanique’s scrutiny of the manipulations of the religious and the kinds of poor immigrants often exploited by them is noteworthy, though, if not at Roth’s level.
Cousin Brent’s exposure of God’s Caravan as a fraud and Fly’s epiphany that he’s been duped is a bit sudden, but the way Yanique plays with the concept of the revelation is a fun conclusion.
If this is part of a short story collection about various forms of mental illness, that could be a seller.
Sean —
Thanks for your reference to Roth here. I got the first volume of his collected works in the Library of America edition and read “Conversion of the Jews”. Well done. Also gave me a chance to re-read “Defender of the Faith”. The guy could write.
I’ve wondered now and then why he never got the Nobel. Reading these two stories, I can see that he was uniquely American and wouldn’t appeal to the Euros. Their loss.
God, it’s dull