Devil Is Fine
Ratings1
Average rating5
15
Ratings1
Average rating5
From acclaimed novelist John Vercher, a profoundly moving novel of what it means to be a father, a son, a writer, and a biracial American fighting to reconcile the past Reeling from the sudden death of his teenage son, our narrator receives a letter from an attorney: he has just inherited a plot of land from his estranged grandfather. He travels to a beach town several hours south of his home with the intention of immediately selling the land. But upon inspection, what lies beneath the dirt is much more than he can process in the throes of grief. As a biracial Black man struggling with the many facets of his identity, he’s now the owner of a former plantation passed down by the men on his white mother’s side of the family. Vercher deftly blurs the lines between real and imagined, past and present, tragedy and humor, and fathers and sons in this story of discovery—and a fight for reclamation—of a painful past. With the wit of Paul Beatty’s The Sellout and the nuance of Zadie Smith’s On Beauty, Devil Is Fine is a darkly funny and brilliantly crafted dissection of the legacies we leave behind and those we inherit.
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This book was both tragic and beautiful all at the same time and I'm so incredibly glad I decided to read it! It opens with the author speaking to his dead son on the way to his funeral. As a mother, this broke me immediately. We don't know how he was lost but the weight of much unfinished between them is palpable and you can feel the author's struggle with not only dealing with the obvious current tragedy but with letting go of all that was unsaid and left unresolved between them.
Struggling with his own identity as a biracial man, he finds that a piece of property, left to his son by his mother's father, has now been passed on to him as his next of kin when his son dies. This was a man he wanted nothing from – his estranged white maternal grandfather. He then travels to the property simply to sell it and in the process finds that it is a former plantation and he is now the owner, a sick irony I can't even imagine.
He does meet some amazing people along the way and while I struggled to connect with him at first, they brought out the lighter side to him for me and I found myself warming to him quickly after that. His thoughts range from delusional drunken dreams to almost supernatural flashbacks, taking on roles that I can totally see as torturous ways your brain could try to deal with something as twisted as this situation he finds himself in. My heart broke for him, again and again.
A beautiful, tragic, moving story that I didn't want to end.
