THE WILDERNESS, by Angela Flournoy
A year and a half ago, I went to Harlem for a discussion between the artist Arthur Jafa and the writer and professor Kellie Jones. Greg Tate, the inimitable cultural critic who died unexpectedly in 2021, came up early in the conversation. He’d been Jafa’s best friend; his absence was palpable in the room. “New York is a haunted house for me,” Jafa said. “I’m a bit of a haunted house myself.”
At that, a gasp passed through the auditorium, a collective intake of breath that spread like devastating news or a box of Kleenex down a pew, its weight quickly diminishing along a line of mourners. The shock may have had to do with hearing put into words Tate’s loss, in a city graffitied with his electric, indelible prose. The shape of it was everything and everywhere, all of the definable and indefinable anguishes that accrue in the wake of such a sudden departure.
Jafa’s phrasing has followed me around since then, and it resounded while I read “The Wilderness,” Angela Flournoy’s astonishing new novel, parts of which are set in Harlem, blocks away from where that talk occurred.
Flournoy has written a book that attests to the phenomenology and psycho-geography of haunting — the ways a person’s mind can become a haunted house, its private ghosts compounding with time and a changing external landscape. (The book is partially dedicated to the memory of a friend of Flournoy’s who died during the final years she spent writing the book.)
Pinballing primarily between New York and Los Angeles, “The Wilderness” tracks the friendship among four women over two decades, beginning in their early 20s in 2008: Desiree, a late bloomer who lives with her aging grandfather and has trouble figuring out her course in life; Nakia, a budding chef and restaurateur (ahem, “proprietress”); Monique, a librarian and blogger who aspires to online fame; and January, a banking analyst turned graphic designer abiding a stagnant romance and deciding whether to keep a pregnancy. (Desiree’s older sister, a distant physician named Danielle, also flits around the edges of the narrative.)
The book’s shifting perspectives trace these women as they mature and negotiate tensions within themselves and with one another, all while the world is tumbling ever more precipitously toward hell. Think: if “Waiting to Exhale” were also about the difficulty of breathing in the Anthropocene amid frequent wildfires and unpredictable political weather. Here, climate grief blends with the general kind.
The novel begins with an ending: 22-year-old Desiree traveling with her diabetic grandfather to Europe, where he plans to have a medically assisted death. Pre-emptively grieving him, she is also nursing long-held sorrows over her mother, Sherelle, who died of a heart attack in her bedroom when Desiree was a child, and her sister, from whom she is estranged.
It was Danielle who discovered Sherelle’s body that day, and shielded her from the gruesome sight: “She called 911 from the bedside table and sat on the floor against the door, blocking Desiree from coming in,” Flournoy writes. “Desiree screamed and kicked and screamed on the other side. What did her sister look at for the 12 long minutes it took the ambulance to arrive, when it was just her and the bed frame and their mother, close by and getting cold? Where had she decided to focus her eyes?”
That memory — a fraught confrontation, mediated through a door that becomes the threshold between life and death — also furthers the author’s deep interest in dwellings and their discontents, established in her sharply observed 2015 debut, “The Turner House.” A finalist for the National Book Award, the novel concerned a large family in Detroit trying to decide what to do with their drastically devalued home of 50 years amid the 2008 housing crisis and the depreciating real estate values in the city’s Black neighborhoods, all while the family’s eldest son contends with a haint.
Like “The Turner House,” “The Wilderness” features a large cast, time shifts, ghosts, evictions, themes of gentrification and institutional neglect. It too is about family — chosen and otherwise (“What was sisterhood but a mutual agreement? Blood didn’t have to mean anything,” Desiree thinks at one point) — and about the distractions of ambition and capitalism. Certain motifs from the earlier book recur here as Easter eggs, subtle signatures like initials inscribed in a metal support beam.
But this sophomore novel is not simply a retread; it expands Flournoy’s mapping of America’s hauntings while also including more sustained levity than her first go-round. The author’s sense of humor flourishes in Nakia’s description of a particular kind of Los Angeles building: “a dingbat — scratchy stucco exterior and wide rectangular profile with impossible, skinny stiletto posts as support — perched on a steep hill. All upper and no lower, like a linebacker in a minidress.”
Flournoy’s heavier insights, too, tend to invoke the imagery of housing and design. Driving through Los Angeles with January after a tense discussion about their respective life choices, Desiree considers the meaning of happiness in adulthood:
Desiree knew the shape it took for her, or rather, its architecture: It was a many-roomed home, a townhouse. There were areas she may never gain access to, but most doors could be opened. The ground floor, the foundation — food and shelter and security — had been lain with great emotional cost but minimal sweat from her brow. … The second floor was populated by the people she’d long loved: this desperate mother-child currently in her back seat. … The third floor was mostly windows, a great room from which she could look out onto the world and feel a part of it but no urgent need to run it or leave any mark on it.
Filtering this broad metaphor through the specific context of each character’s desires and regrets, the passage is not just smart; it stings. The reader can imagine the windows in Desiree’s imaginary model home fogging up.
The cover of “The Wilderness” features a 2014 Mickalene Thomas painting called “Interior: Zebra With Two Chairs and Funky Fur,” which depicts a glamorous sitting room decorated elaborately with bright colors and animal prints. It’s a complementary pairing: Thomas’s interest in Black women’s interiority and our living spaces, the carefully curated rooms we triumph, wonder and crumble within, mirrors the splendor and coiled characterizations of Flournoy’s cast.
Anchored by the influence of her forebears, some of whom are quoted in the book’s epigraphs or referenced elsewhere — Toni Morrison, Octavia E. Butler, Audre Lorde, Gayl Jones, June Jordan and Wanda Coleman, the celebrated Los Angeles poet — Flournoy has suffused her novel with the kind of variegated and critical tenderness that abounds in their work.
Even the title of the book suggests a subtle provocation along the lines of Malcolm X’s memorable invocation of the phrase “the wilderness of North America” in describing Black people’s need to “wake up and understand who they are.”
Taken alongside Thomas’s animal prints on the cover, it also signifies what Danielle calls “the wilderness of adult life,” in which she feels she has been “frog-marched into a deep, hard-to-navigate forest of decisions and failure and hurt.”
And it speaks as well to the metatextual wilderness of publishing a second novel, which tends to do a different kind of work than a debut — refining and complicating the writer’s preoccupations, rather than establishing them. The writer herself, like each of her individual characters, is endeavoring to explore and grow.
Later, the narrative transforms into something darker and more harrowing than a portrait of evolving friendship, tipping into speculative fiction as the women are forced to directly confront the disturbing nature of this country’s economic and political foundations. In Flournoy’s hands, that burgeoning self-knowledge feels both political and exquisitely personal.
Monique is the biggest mystery of the book; I wish I got to know her private trials and perceptions more intimately. Readers spend the least amount of time with her consciousness, and most of what we do learn about her we get via excerpts from her blog, which features the kind of expository clarity and certainty common to internet platforms that the rest of “The Wilderness” is blessedly an escape from.
Regarding knotty character life, these internet entries are as stripped as a mowed clearing — there are no thickets of intention, no branching impressions. But maybe that’s the point. Perhaps Flournoy is commenting on the illusory nature of some online writing, which announces the expression of a person’s humanity but more often ends up obscuring it.
The novel’s transcendent third section shifts nimbly through a suite of poetic chapters from the third person to the first. With the move from omniscience to individuality, Flournoy seems to be signaling the ways that collective knowledge can act on personal instinct, and vice versa — that the two might not be separate, but coterminous.
If one of the touchstones for “The Turner House” was Morrison’s “Beloved,” the later chapters of “The Wilderness” wistfully and beautifully allude to “Sula,” another second novel about female friendship and its attendant falling-outs and disappointments, the psychic dimensions of lived-in places and relationships.
“Aren’t our nearest and dearest always our business, even when it’s not technically our business?” Desiree asks as she travels across the country to be at January’s postpartum bedside. To use another term in the author’s architectural taxonomy, Flournoy convinces us that friendship can be a safe house, especially when the world outside is menacing.
Morrison ends “Sula” with a sorrowful call from the title character’s best friend, Nel, a chant that fills a profound absence with language: “O Lord, Sula,” she calls out, both apologizing to her late companion and articulating the pain of missing and being haunted by her. “Girl, girl, girlgirlgirl.”
Flournoy’s account of the emotional vicissitudes of friendship and its endurance evokes the hushed, disconsolate quality of Morrison’s closing chapter. Nel’s cry might also provide a pithy way of acknowledging the power of Flournoy’s achievement, in reinterpreting so vividly the story of platonic intimacy: Girl.
THE WILDERNESS | By Angela Flournoy | Mariner | 292 pp. | $30
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