‘Loving Day,’ by Mat Johnson
In his own words, Warren Duffy is “a Negro who looks like a Lithuanian rugby player.”
Or, as he expounds elsewhere in Mat Johnson’s new novel, “Loving Day,” I am a racial optical illusion ... as visually duplicitous as the illustration of the young beauty that’s also the illustration of the old hag. ...
Freshly divorced from his Welsh wife, Becks, Warren has returned from Britain to the Germantown neighborhood of Philadelphia, to reclaim his late white father’s legacy, a crumbling, scarcely habitable and potentially haunted mansion on 70 acres in the ghetto.
Consumed by a harebrained scheme to burn the house for insurance money, and biding his time until he can practically manage this, Warren sets off to a comic-book convention to sketch portraits for cash.
[...] he’s promptly confronted by a 17-year-old Jewish girl named Tal and her grandfather Irv, who explains that she’s Warren’s child — the product of a forgotten high school fling with his daughter, who is now deceased.
[...] order, and somewhat improbably even for a story that traffics in the paranormal, Tal installs herself in the disintegrating house (sleeping in a camping tent pitched in the dining room), Irv dies, and Warren resolves himself to make up for lost time and be a responsible father.
At his best, Johnson is not only laugh-out-loud funny but also a seriously keen observer of the preposterousness of our idea of race.
Because Warren doesn’t want his daughter’s “first real experience with black folks [to] be running from them,” he decides against sending Tal to the local public school in Germantown.
The people at the Mélange Center, however, are the “human equivalent of mismatched socks.”
At times, the subplots — one involving Warren’s stereotypical black friend Tosha and her philandering husband, another involving his own ridiculous paramour Sunita “Sun” Habersham, a voluptuous and self-actualized mixed-race woman who happens to love comic books and cringe-inducingly screams “Shazam!” when she climaxes — can seem a lot like filler.