dem by William Melvin Kelley

Review by Eleanor Updegraff

 A quick glance at the epigraph (actually one of several) to William Melvin Kelley’s third novel, dem, is a good indication of what lies in store for the unsuspecting reader. Written in the International Phonetic Alphabet, the single sentence ‘næʊ, lǝmi tǝljǝ hæʊ dǝm foks lıv . . .’ may at first look utterly perplexing, but does in fact prove easier to decipher than one might think: ‘Now, lemme tell ya how dem folks live . . .’ It is a fitting introduction to a novel that reads in many ways like the folk tale that could follow such a sentence, a novel that deals with universal themes through a subversive lens, and manages to be both familiar and unsettling at the same time.

First published in 1967, after which it faded into obscurity along with its author – only recently, following his death in 2017, has there been a resurgence of interest in Kelley, who in his lifetime drew comparisons to Faulkner and Joyce and has since been hailed as one of Black America’s literary heroes – dem is a dazzling satire on race relations that takes as its focal point the bumbling figure of Mitchell Pierce. White, middle class and married, with a job at an advertising agency that taxes his limited creativity, Mitchell begins the book as a distinctly average figure who, through a series of absurd accidents, finds his life slipping entirely out of control.

Following an injury during a beach holiday with his wife Tam (who is as cold to as she is looked down on by her husband), Mitchell spends several weeks confined to the house and, in his loneliness, falls in love with a soap opera character. As his obsession with the beautiful Nancy begins to bleed into everyday life, he tries – and fails – to betray his wife at roughly the same time as she is in hospital giving birth to their second and third children, only one of whom will prove to be Mitchell’s. Tam’s twins, one Black and one white, are the products of superfecundation, a definition of which Kelley helpfully provides at the beginning of the novel (two men, her lover and her husband, have impregnated Tam within hours of each other). Horrified at the idea of raising a Black son, the cuckolded Mitchell sets out to find the second father, Cooley, an erstwhile boyfriend of their former household help.

The resulting chaos, a wild ride through a New York that becomes increasingly dark in just about every respect, involves wild car rides, orgiastic dreams and Mitchell himself trying to pass as a Black man. By this time having dropped any semblance of realism, Kelley seems inclined to bombard his readers with comic scenes and an entirely overwrought depiction of our bigoted white hero’s worst nightmare, yet the more entertaining aspects of the book only thinly conceal what is going on underneath. Because as abhorrent as Mitchell and his worldviews are – on race in particular, but also women, children, immigration and the lower classes – they are really not that wide of the mark when it comes to reflecting the racism and prejudice entrenched in predominantly white society. In prodding mercilessly at his passive antihero’s weak points, almost arousing our sympathies as life gets the better of Mitchell, Kelley unseats the reader too, holding up a mirror to our own behaviour and questioning some of the ingrained social attitudes to which we probably would rather not admit.

Stylistically and thematically, there is a lot going on in dem. It works, most of the time, thanks to the almost total lack of plot and careful management of light, harmless comedy against a more serious satirical foundation. That said, it does require some cooperation on the part of the reader, a willingness to throw ourselves into Kelley’s world, to buckle up for the ride and ask questions about it later. More than this, an overdose of absurdity in some of the weaker scenes may tax the reader’s patience, while the laconic tone means that some incidences of racial discrimination seem brushed off perhaps a little too lightly – ‘the Indian’ of the opening scene, for example, or the Vietnamese women whom Mitchell and his colleague Godwin reminisce about taking advantage of. This does, however, appear to be Kelley’s prevailing style: throw everything at them, and see what they make of it.

This is certainly the end result of the novel – and its main strength. Once the smoke has cleared on the wreckage of Mitchell Pierce’s life, it is up to us to pick up the pieces and examine what they mean. While open to a degree of interpretation, in a real-world sense Kelley seems to be challenging us to look closely at our own behaviour and actively to change it (after all, Mitchell’s infuriating passivity is what leads to his downfall). Wildly creative, stylistically assured, and still as relevant today as it was when it was first published, dem is a biting, moralising novel that requires its readers to conduct the final reckoning.

dem is published by Quercus Books, 8th June 2021