Julian Strickland is seemingly the lone Black man in the hipster dreamland of Portland, Oregon. To his friends, he's the coolest member of the scene: the soulful drummer from Chicago in an indie rock band that's just about to break through. But to himself, he's a sheltered Christian homeschool kid who used to write book reports on Leviticus. A virgin until the night of his marriage, divorced at twenty-four, he's still in disarray two years later. Then he meets Ida Blair, a Black painter at the start of a promising career.
What Boyd does so well is communicate the stifling, breathtaking reality of what it means to exist in a world that treats you like an extraterrestrial ... Julian’s heightened sense of awareness, one of the novel’s most endearing traits, leaves room for genuine humor ... The Weight presents the engrossing portrait of a man in a bizarre place, at a bizarre time, doing what he can to live with the extraordinary load he carries in his heart and the sheer mass imposed upon his mind.
Boyd’s writing is preternaturally wise, and his characters come to life with natural dialogue and brutally honest confrontations. This pulses with the beat of life.
