“Whiteness – that’s not really something you can be half of,” Warren Duffy, the main character of Mat Johnson’s Loving Day, tells his daughter midway through the book. “That’s more of an all or nothing privilege, perspective thing.”
Duffy’s view on this matter is born of personal experience; he is himself the son of a white father and a black mother. Yet as Duffy reminds us often, he feels the ambiguity of his heritage deeply. Which makes it doubly intriguing that he mostly insists his daughter see things more clearly, literally in black and white.
Duffy is not a straight-arrow of a person, himself. He is a down-on-his-luck comic book artist who has fled to a crumbling mansion in the Germantown neighbourhood of Philadelphia. The mansion was owned by his father and is really the only asset Duffy has, though his balance sheet shows plenty of debits: a failing career, a disastrous marriage, and as we are told very early on in the novel, his daughter Tal. Tal is the result of a brief teenage dalliance with a Jewish acquaintance, and now 17 herself. She needs someone to send her to college, and her mother’s family can no longer care for her. And so this girl, who insists “I’m white” when first meeting her father , comes into Warren’s charge.
Duffy’s bumbling attempts at caring for Tal provide what plot the book possesses. The mess of Warren’s life is symbolized by the house; for accommodations he can only offer Tal a tent set up in one of the rooms. Unable to afford private school, he installs Tal at a ramshackle but idealistic outfit called The Mélange Center for Multi-racial Life. This institution, in its first incarnation, consists of a caravan of trailers installed in a public park. “Our goal,” its founder tells Warren, “is to overcome the conflict of binary. To find the sacred balance.”
Dialogue like that signals that what has heretofore been a funny, intelligent and self-aware account of a man’s agonized inner life is going to take a turn into high absurdity. It’s not that the opening chapters of Loving Day present themselves as strict realism. But as ghosts, and women who yell “Shazam!” at the moment of orgasm, and admissions quizzes with questions like “Was OJ Simpson guilty?” on them begin to dominate the narrative, the mood changes. The reader is no longer just listening to the wry self-deprecation of a chronic depressive; they’re plunged instead into a high-energy romp that ends, as romps often do, in an explosion.
It is, of course, impossible to get away from the fact that what is being sent up here is actual injustice. The title Loving Day refers to a holiday enshrined to celebrate the victory of Mildred and Richard Loving at the supreme court, whose 1967 decision in Loving v Virginia struck down anti-miscegenation laws. The Lovings spent time in jail simply for being married; they were exiled from their state for refusing to obey those laws. Their win in court was a watershed moment for civil rights.
And as many reviewers have been at pains to point out, Johnson also recently contributed an essay to the New York Times magazine on the matter. “My mixed identity isn’t a rejection of my mother or of blackness – it’s an integration of blackness with the rest of who I am,” he wrote. “But still, mixed with what?”
Those facts give the book the weight of an actual experience even when it’s spiralling off into comedy. But them, a firm separation between comedy and “serious matters” rarely makes much sense. Injustice is a serious matter, of course, to be dealt with by serious people in serious ways. But even the most horrific abuses of power leave a great many absurdities in their wake.
Mostly what Loving Day wants to say is that the very concept of race is one. But Johnson isn’t “post-racial”, not in the least. For all his equivocations, what Duffy seems to resent most about his racial identity is how inescapable that absurdity is. He doesn’t want to transcend race; he wants it to be a source of personal identity even as he can see how incoherent it is.
After all, Duffy observes at one point, “people aren’t social, they’re tribal. Race doesn’t exist, but tribes are fucking real.” But then, being Duffy, being conflicted, and having found a certain identity in the conflict he doubles back again: “What am I saying? I’m on Team Blackie.”
