How Are You Going to Save Yourself asks questions about race and sex, about families and about what happens to us when communications break down. It's a shockingly powerful debut collection from a writer whose talent seems almost limitless ... Holmes addresses the difficulties inherent in all kinds of relationships ... Holmes writes with a brutal honesty in every story, posing questions many would rather leave unasked ... It's hard to overstate what an incredible writer Holmes is. He has a real gift for phrasing ... a debut book that reads like the work of a writer with decades of experience. It's an unflinching look at themes that not too many authors are eager to tackle, and a book that asks important questions and challenges the reader to answer them honestly, as uncomfortable as those answers might be.
The raucous, heartbreaking, bawdy tales in JM Holmes’s debut collection possess an assured lyricism, uncompromising in its interrogation of race, class, drugs and family ... In the explosive opener ... the story culminates in a moment so brutally honest, so quietly ferocious, it left me dazed ... As with any collection, some stories are stronger than others. Holmes renders male characters with microscopic precision; the same level of nuance afforded to his female characters would have added even more depth ... he is a distinctive writer ... Spare in style, strikingly urgent, his is a voice to get excited about.
Particularly in coming-of-age fiction, dialogue can be a liability; quips can mask nuance, and realism is aspired to far more often than it’s reached. But dialogue is the engine, the power, of How Are You Going to Save Yourself. Holmes’ uncanny ear is so delicately rendered that the book not only bursts with life during each back-and-forth, but it evolves, steeped as it is in the rhythms of family squabbles and serious discussions and, most centrally, friends shooting the s—t ... If not overwhelming, How Are You Going to Save Yourself is certainly tough, entrusting its players’ words (and, perhaps more importantly, lack thereof) to communicate what their actions cannot. The trick doesn’t work every time. But the message sings throughout, and the final blow Holmes delivers is inescapably staggering.
In interconnected short stories, Holmes’ debut breathes life into a group of friends who are simultaneously trying to shake off their past and honor it ... He doesn’t shy away from difficult subject matter or from showing his characters’ flaws, which makes for some incredibly tough scenes to read, but also highlights the everyday travails of black men in America. Readers looking for timely, nuanced fiction about race and masculinity should definitely pick this up.
JM Holmes believes in dialogue ... his lyricism, his depth of prose, pops with quiet authority ... Holmes’ uncanny ear is so delicately rendered that the book not only bursts with life during each back-and-forth, but it evolves ... How Are You Going to Save Yourself moves to these familiar, lifelike beats, and achieves an electrifying singularity in the process. Though pitched and structured as a story collection, this is a book of novelistic richness.
This provocative story cycle follows a group of young black men—Gio, Rolls, Rye, and Dub—from a rundown area of Pawtucket, RI, as they grow into adulthood ... These stories are as powerful and tough-minded as the realities of race, class, and identity the characters confront. Holmes depicts troubled lives with candor and compassion. A notable debut.
How Are You Going to Save Yourself sits in your mouth and leaves a taste like blood, a push like a bruise. It curdles in your stomach, but you can't stop swaying to its rhythm. You realize this is terrifying, and familiar ... There were times when I needed to put it down, step back and breathe. I was able to pick it back up again because Holmes knew exactly what he was doing and how, dragging into the light the pathetic, masochistic, unimaginable cruelty of toxic masculinity.
How Are You Going to Save Yourself for the most part achieves what it sets out to do, offering a layered and occasionally unsettling look at race, relationships and sex among a group of men in early adulthood ... Holmes switches clumsily between characters in his stories, diluting the power of scenes ... a clever and emotive piece of writing ... Holmes is strong on dialogue, and the dialect of the four friends when they’re hanging out together ... A neat circuity links the collection’s opening and closing stories, both steeped in the politics of race, sex and violence.
As up-to-the-minute as a Kendrick Lamar track and as ruefully steeped in eternal truths as a Gogol tale, these stories of young working-class black men coming into their dubious inheritances mark the debut of an assured young talent in American storytelling ... The stories are by turns comedic, bawdy, heartbreaking, and grisly. What links them all is the heady style deployed throughout; language with the same taut rhythm and blunt imagery as the best hip-hop yet capable of intermittent surges of lyricism that F. Scott Fitzgerald in his own precocious stories of youthful romance and remorse could summon.
...[a] crackling debut ... For all his excellence, however, Holmes does not write female characters with the same nuance he affords his male characters ... Nevertheless, Holmes proves his ability to navigate vulnerability, as well as his fearlessness in tackling tense situations head-on, all of which combines for a collection of superb stories.
