Folarin delivers a remarkably mature narrator, who must make peace with his past and navigate racial realities in the U.S. He wrestles with the shadows cast by both home-brewed racism and vestiges of colonialism imported from Nigeria.
Folarin is attentive to the ways in which mental illness and the particular crises of poverty, immigration and Blackness can dovetail, and how communal silence and shame can magnify one rupture into many ... The novel moves among literary modes and registers, its formal elasticity reflecting the ways in which Folarin’s protagonist situates himself in the world, as the narrow, first-person lens of the early childhood chapters gives way to anxiously diaristic teenage years ...The dilemmas of diaspora as they intersect with masculinity have corrosive effects on not just selfhood but intimacy; in this Folarin is working in an American tradition with many literary forebears ... what emerges most clearly in its pages is a study of the particulate self, the self as a constellation of moving parts. By the book’s denouement, there are no simple resolutions; only encounters, fragile connections, the mere suggestions of answers.
...a powerful story that is equal parts loneliness and hope ... While juggling themes of the struggles of immigrant families and the effect of parental mental illness, Folarin plays with structure and pacing, sometimes filling a page with only one poignant line ... It’s an insightful and moving novel, through and through.
... spare and affecting ... Tunde recounts his troubled upbringing with a hypnotic mix of tenderness and analytic detachment. At times recalling Meursault in The Stranger—another displaced loner who loses his mother—he emphasizes the elusiveness of identity for a young immigrant who never stays long in the same place ... More existential than Afropolitan ... Folarin’s decision to write about a suburban, working-class Nigerian family living farther west—as do growing numbers of Africans, especially in Minnesota and Texas—is refreshing because it portrays the estrangement of immigrants outside the enclaves where new arrivals typically cluster ... It’s hard not to feel cheated by the neat resolution; the book wraps up just as Tunde starts to complicate his parents’ portraits.
This searing, powerful novel is a stunning debut by Tope Folarin, offering a look into the disorienting life of a first-generation Nigerian-American ... Folarin has written a compelling, lyrical story about alienation and identity, the kind that sticks inside you long after you've finished reading.
...while the narrative is largely linear, it’s not always neat: spatio-temporal shifts, disappearing mothers, and multiple migrations make room for a more complex, unpredictable portrait of childhood. With every turn of the page, the pattern changes. Don’t get too comfortable, the narrative cautions the reader. What begins as a strictly first-person (confessional-style) autobiography, an exercise in memoir writing and memory keeping, shifts briefly to third-person—Folarin being playful on the page ... Folarin writes rage, remorse, and resignation delicately, with restraint. What begins as autobiography gives way to meta-fictional interventions.
A Particular Kind of Black Man is a straightforward story ... No great surprises. No totally unexpected twists in the telling. Not up in the star league of top Nigerian novelists—the likes of Nobel Prize winner Wole Soyinka, Man Booker Prize winners, Ben Okri and Chinua Achebe, and also two up and coming women, Helen Oyeyemi and Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie who wrote Americanah, the only other Nigerian novel besides A Particular Kind of Black Man to be set in the US. Nevertheless, if not in the top class in this African country, which has made good novel writing an industry, Folarin’s is a subtle novel that pulls you into the minutae of the story. The delight is in the detail. It is the drawing of the characters, the setting of the situations—usually of acerbic hardship—and the pacing of the experiences that will draw the reader in. The truths about human longing and desire are laid bare in Tunde’s character. The pain of failure combined with the willed urge to look happy in public and to bring his boys up to be independently minded, strong-willed and well-educated young men are touchingly and poignantly manifest in his father.
[A] strong debut ... Folarin questions the reliability of memory, and biography in general ... The novel threatens to devolve into juvenile pining for a first love, but Folarin rescues it with a touching, almost illusory coda.
... tender, cunning ... Folarin pulls off the crafty trick of simultaneously bringing scenes to sharp life and undercutting their reliability, and evokes the complexities of life as a second-generation African-American in simple, vivid prose. Foralin’s debut is canny and electrifying.
