PanThe New York Times Book Review... fashions itself as an anthropological study of a contemporary white liberalism far less invested in the eradication of evil than in the ridiculous self-flagellations of the ruling classes. But it flattens its subjects, stripping them of both familiarity and farcicality. The result is a profound hollowness of character and form that undermines the novelist’s worthy ambition ... The novel’s racists — including both classic bigots, like Harry’s parents, and white liberals, like Harry — lack the nuance of real anti-Blackness. Every white person in Harry Sylvester Bird sounds and acts the way Twitter threads and Instagram infographics tell me white people sound and act. In fact, every Black person sounds like the strained, tsk-ing narrators of such \'online activism.\' Both anti-Blackness and antiracism — and human beings — are far trickier than the pat instruction manuals guiding mainstream race discourse can allow. But in Harry Sylvester Bird, that trickiness feels unduly smoothed and streamlined. The richness of human behavior, especially at its worst, is lost ... also lacks the thrilling surrealism that animates successful racial caricature. The bumbling idiocies of these characters are, for the most part, devoid of any sense of absurdity. They’re presented as obviously immoral, obviously silly, obviously true; but satire works by making the familiar unfamiliar, the obvious unbelievable ... One fundamental step in this progression — a twist that emerges at the novel’s center — makes clear that Okparanta is the opposite of a shallow writer. This narrative beat, injecting a genuinely satirical, even anarchic energy into the book, is full proof of the author’s wit and sheer bravery. Somewhere within Harry Sylvester Bird is a more bracing book that disorganizes the world, rather than congealing it into trite ideological narratives. This alternate book struggles for air underneath the one we’ve got, and occasionally manages to surface ... finds itself caught up in an ominous trend: its satirical indictments of white liberalism reading as only so much rote gymnastics, mandated by the rules of antiracist art rather than inspired by any internal momentum from within the story itself. It seems as though the more ubiquitous such art becomes, the more toothless it grows. This reveals less about the cowardice of the modern artist than about the race politics that dominate the smarmy, self-assured world of modern liberalism ... This is the world Okparanta wants to tear open. But in its ultimate complacency, the novel reveals the stickiness of that egoistic \'antiracism,\' the way it sneakily persists in structuring, and limiting, our art and our politics. Resigned to its own self-reflexivity, Harry Sylvester Bird won’t let itself say much worth saying.
Rax King
PositiveLos Angeles Review of BooksWhat ultimately matters, for King, is not (just) the garbage itself, but the person who loves them ... Sometimes, the whiplash is jarring, frequently almost surreal. Yet, it is never forced; the juxtapositions make perfect sense ... King’s autobiographical tangents sketch a deeply familiar, and deeply sad, narrative of a child slowly learning that the world quickly turns its mocking fury from bad artists to their vulnerable fans. The first thing King ever hears called tacky is not a thing at all, but a person: her grandmother. It’s not just bad movies and TV and pathetic 2000s boy-rock that needs a champion, but also the people who love them. By offering herself up as a kind of case study, aimed at the project of humanizing tacky people, King humanizes us all, because who among us has successfully resisted the siren song of trash? What King reveals is that our failure to resist reveals the loveliness of our flawed, feeble, and sometimes glorious humanness ... Tacky falls flat when read as a full-throated defense of tackiness as an objective, and objectively good, feature of art. That’s not how King wants it to be read. Read it, instead, as a love letter to tacky people, exactly as they (we) are.
