Reading [Romance in Marseille], I got the sweaty, panicked sensation of wanting to 'do something' with the information I had ('This book is incredible') before anyone else did. This is how I imagine it feels to be a jewel thief who finds a key to the museum, except what I’m empowered to 'do' with this hot tip instead of stealing a fortune is composing a review ... custom-designed, it would seem, for the modern obliterated attention span! But as with any novel, the themes are only bits of thread unless woven into a dazzling tapestry of a character, which is what we have in Lafala ... there is the best description I’ve ever read of human legs, as well as the best description of waking up and feeling like shit, the best description of erotic satisfaction, and — to dip into extravagant specificity for a moment — the best description of a Corsican pimp fretting that his girlfriend is mentally distancing herself from him ... a novel out of time.

... fascinating ... shows McKay presciently grappling with the destinies of those he calls the 'outcasts and outlaws of civilizations' — migrants in thriving port cities central to the flow of global commerce — and with the violent upheavals and desperate striving that deposited them there ... McKay’s political critique remains biting ... what is remarkable about McKay’s fiction is its rejection of sentimentality of any stripe. Unlike some of his peers in the New Negro Renaissance, McKay refuses to make his fiction 'decorous and decorative' in order to paint a flattering portrait of black life, opting instead for what he admitted could be a 'crude realism' ... queer desire is simply a fact — an acknowledged part of the social landscape — in a way that makes the book seem all the more ahead of its time. The sex is not explicit, but the couplings are impassioned: sometimes vicious, sometimes tender, sometimes vulgar, but above all raw.

... less shocking than strikingly woke, given that its themes include disability, the full spectrum of sexual preference, radical politics and the subtleties of racial identity ... McKay writes in a loose, somewhat elliptical style, with a fair amount of slangy dialect, but he does occasionally grow quite lyrical ... The editors surround McKay’s text with a mildly academic introduction, a discussion of the manuscript’s textual history and 30 pages of explanatory notes. Their critical apparatus sets the novel in its own time and establishes its importance ... Had McKay’s novel been published when it was first written, it would now look right at home in the proletarian company of William Faulkner’s Sanctuary (1931), Erskine Caldwell’s Tobacco Road (1932), James M. Cain’s noir classic The Postman Always Rings Twice (1934) and even, from certain angles, Nathanael West’s bleak comedy Miss Lonelyhearts (1933).

... a daring work of nostalgia, sex, and violence populated with pimps, prostitutes, and 'bistro bandits' (barflies) ... In the first few short chapters, Lafala is so thinly drawn that McKay risks making him appear merely a cipher for a governing idea of a black everyman subjugated by inhumane and racist corporations. He’s saved from that reductive interpretation through his association with a fellow patient called Black Angel, the only other black man in the hospital ... a pitiful tale, but McKay said his intention was not to write 'a sentimental story.' He succeeded ... Writing and language that had appeared self-conscious and stilted, even a little pedestrian, in the earlier chapters becomes looser and more confident as the novel advances, fired especially by the complexity of Aslima’s character. The monochromatic world of the New York hospital ward gives way to the exuberant Technicolor of Marseille, even if Lafala still seems at times a colorized version of a black-and-white self ... McKay ably depicts the reversals and disappointments that induce a kind of learned helplessness among the seamen, vagabonds, and other formerly itinerant adventurers ... a tender tale, a mounting litany of loss and regret.

... perhaps McKay’s most complicated examination of marginalized economic and social classes ... Our sense of the Harlem Renaissance, Holcomb said, is growing to encompass 'something much more complex and broader than the original idea' of 'a cultural nationalist African-American movement.' Romance in Marseille, one of the Renaissance’s most radical texts, hidden for decades from public view, makes a natural avatar for that development.

... gorgeously seamy ... An unshackled and bitingly funny melodrama plays out in the bars of Marseille’s Vieux Port ... McKay revels in this human glue pot of blacks, Arabs, whites, straights and gays, prostitutes, gigolos, dockworkers and seamen, schemers, dreamers and political rabble-rousers. The language he fashions mirrors the mélange, blending vernacular with showy archaisms and words of McKay’s own invention. The fusion is as heady and bewitching as the scene of a Vieux Port dance floor, where 'everybody was close together in a thick juice melted by wine and music.'

McKay’s commitment to creating truly marginal characters is extraordinary for the period, and the book will undoubtedly provide a rich text for contemporary theorists in a number of disciplines. Lafala’s captivity and travails dovetail with Christina Sharpe’s theorization of the hold, the shipped, and the wake. The fact that McKay (who was bisexual himself) includes openly queer, unpathologized characters is notable for the time, and may also account for his publishers’ reluctance to print the book. Still, there’s something that doesn’t work, things that don’t quite make sense—plot holes and discontinuities raise more questions than McKay is willing to answer ... ninety years on from its creation—its seams show, the novel’s gaps reveal the constructed nature of all that we assume to be natural and whole.

Harlem Renaissance writer McKay’s poignant, previously unpublished novel of 1920s black life in the French port city of Marseilles strengthens the legacy built by his novels Banjo and Home to Harlem ... Marseille comes to life in McKay’s descriptions of Quayside cafés, frequented by a vibrant social mix of black intellectuals like the Marxist Etienne St. Dominique, white laborers such as the queer Big Blonde, and sex workers including the North African Aslima and her rival, La Fleur. This will move readers to consider large questions about the need to belong and the desire for love.