Iweala is still interested in style, this time the kind of clarity we sometimes associate with Hemingway and mistakenly term simple ... Niru’s homosexuality is very much the book’s subject, and the text is interested in dualities — Americans and Africans, white and black, gay and straight, devout and skeptic, the black immigrant and the black American — while always returning to the question of what his gayness says about who Niru is. Iweala writes with such ease about adolescents and adolescence that Speak No Evil could well be a young adult novel. At the same time he toys with other well-defined forms: the immigrant novel, the gay coming-of-age novel, the novel of being black in America. The resulting book is a hybrid of all these ... In his smart exploration of generational conflict, of what it is to be a gay man, of the crisis of existence as a black man, Iweala is very much a realist. Perhaps the trouble is my own wish that reality itself were different.
Iweala compellingly illustrates how traditional Nigerian, Christian values abhor homosexuality: it’s just not an option. He brings to life how painful this journey is for a family, how it rips a family apart when there is bigotry and intolerance woven into their relationships. We root for young Niru, but there is no safe harbor for him ... Iweala vividly recounts the story of a young man set apart. He does so with clarity and depth, making you feel Niru’s pain—understand how it is to be rejected by everyone and everything you love—to be an outsider. Most coming out stories are difficult, it’s never an easy process, but when faced with a culture and a church that sometimes reject you outright, and in no uncertain terms, it’s even lonelier. There aren’t always happy endings and the author gives us that experience with great emotion and sensitivity. Speak No Evil isn’t an easy read. It is, however, compelling, sensitively told, and satisfying.
If Niru’s struggle with family, friends and sexuality makes Speak No Evil sound like a YA novel, then perhaps it is ... The language is clean and direct enough to be read by young people, and the sexual scenes not overly explicit. But the author brings an adult sensibility to his subject ... Though it takes place in seemingly safe D.C. rather than a war-torn African nation, Speak No Evil is a more ambitious and riskier novel [than Beasts of No Nation], with a deeper understanding of its characters’ conflicted hearts. Mr. Iweala’s novel weaves together sexual, religious and political strands as it builds to a devastating climax.
The classic coming-out narrative describes how the central character makes a leap from one identity to another, into a different, freer life, while the classic immigrant novel depicts what it’s like to straddle two worlds, old and new, with a foothold in each. Speak No Evil is both and neither ... Iweala’s technique is uneven. Sometimes he borrows canned storytelling devices from TV and film ... These clichés sit uneasily beside such literary affectations as the absence of quotation marks. But Iweala can also invoke the bland, vacant tranquillity of his upscale setting in a few potent lines ... For a place deliberately designed to have no particular qualities, the novel’s D.C. suburb feels palpably real.
With nods to James Baldwin and the Black Lives Matter movement, and echoes of Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie’s Americanah (2013) — a story of a young Nigerian woman trying to make sense of the US — Speak No Evil could easily feel like an assemblage of trending motifs. What saves the book is its adept storytelling and eye for lucid detail; though the destination of this story is tragically unsurprising, it has the stomach-churning pace of a Greek tragedy. Iweala’s scope is modest — those handful of streets, 10 or so scenes, a couple of hundred pages — but the novel burns with teenage intensity ... Some of the narrative signposting is so obtrusive as to be a trip hazard, and the decision to tell the final section from another perspective makes the denouement more muddled than it should be. Given that the author grew up in Washington, the place feels oddly remote: a city under glass rather than a metropolis with its own tangled racial history. Yet even though you long for Iweala to write something more symphonic and densely woven next time, Speak No Evil has a seriousness that feels authentic to its subject. It is a quieter achievement than Beasts; but no less sincere.
With his second novel, Speak No Evil, Iweala once again allows a young voice to ring clearly, shattering assumptions and demanding attention for unavoidable truths—this time about being black, queer and the child of successful immigrants in the United States ... This graceful, consuming tale of differences, imbalances and prejudices is necessary reading.
Speak No Evil is a muted, minor-chord novel. The trip to Nigeria and a startling moment of racial violence late in the book aside, it is a fairly mild and conventional gay coming-of-age novel ... It’s a book about race and gender and identity but not an especially telling book about those things ... There are moments in this novel that hint at Iweala’s freer, more essayistic voice. He is probing on how, back home in Nigeria, Niru’s father is a different man — larger and louder, he seems to take up more space ... Not enough scenes are this alive. Like so many second novels, this one feels like a book Iweala had to get out of the way in order to arrive at what he really wants to write next.
Iweala is a unique and surprising writer; the story he tells is neither of those things ... The tragic inevitability of Niru’s journey is less illuminating than familiar, less gut-wrenching than exhausting. The page-turning effect is monotonous, a screed inflamed by anger and pain. We’re not permitted to get to know Niru, goes the novel’s argument, because he’s not permitted to know himself. Speak No Evil feels patched together in that respect, alternating between stunning and tired chunks of narrative almost on a whim.
In his third book, Iweala...delivers with immediate poignancy Niru’s struggles between rejecting his parents’ constrictions and yearning for them; between embracing his sexuality and believing there’s a cure for it, and that it should be cured at all ... Portraying cross-generational and -cultural misunderstandings with anything but simplicity, Iweala tells an essential American story.
The first thing to say about Speak No Evil...is that it is both less daring and more familiar than Beasts of No Nation ... Speak No Evil, for all the time that has passed, feels more tentative, less polished, more, in short, like a first novel ... Some of the passages in which Niru struggles to come to terms with his attraction to men are well handled, but they feel like they’ve been extended beyond their natural life until repetitions creep in. The reader develops an increasingly desperate wish for Niru to act upon his inclinations rather than simply turning them over in his mind. When the plot does suddenly spring to life, the twist, albeit heart?wrenching, feels borrowed from another story altogether.
Speak No Evil reveals the worst-case scenario ... interrogates what it means to live in a climate of police brutality, or to develop an identity that intersects with multiple marginalized groups ... The tragic inevitability of Niru’s journey is less illuminating than familiar, less gut-wrenching than exhausting. The page-turning effect is monotonous, a screed inflamed by anger and pain ... Speak No Evil feels patched together in that respect, alternating between stunning and tired chunks of narrative ... Iweala’s forceful writing, defined by sentences of only a handful of words that move at an accelerated clip, shines when he digs into Niru’s psyche. He has a rare gift for capturing stream-of-consciousness thought, tackling it at a pace that’s quick but authentic. His book’s structure is rooted in the style, and so it’s strange the degree he seems to resist its potential ... With every step Iweala takes toward tragedy, our window into Niru’s soul gets narrower.
With that taut and compelling read, Iweala demonstrated a narrative aptitude that bordered on audacious for a debut novelist, capturing the horrific scope of modern tribal warfare, while grounding the story in Agu's unravelling psyche. Iweala has certainly retained his dexterity in the 15 years since Beasts of No Nation was published, but in contrast to its predecessor, Speak No Evil is less broad and less bold for a writer of his calibre ... Iweala's ability to not only comfortably inhabit the mind of his teenage narrator, but speak to the precarious social location of a gay diasporic African in America is at times a blessing and at other times a stumbling block in this novel's construction ... Speak No Evil is a beautifully written novel. But underneath its style lies a story that ultimately does too much topically, while falling short of the subject matter it attempts to challenge.
Speak No Evil deals with less epic subject matter [than Beasts of No Nation], but there’s subtle power in its intimacy and in its depictions of the violence we do to each other and to ourselves ... The novel would have been well served by a deeper exploration of Niru’s ambivalence toward Nigeria ... The passages that demonstrate the suffocating sense of Niru being trapped in his father’s expectations for him, of a young man simultaneously rebelling against the ways of his elders while struggling to embrace his true self, show Iweala at his best.
An evocative narrative and stark dialogue keeps Uzodinma Iweala’s Speak No Evil from a single dull moment ... His characters’ rawness and beauty overwhelm page by page.
In Uzodinma’s staggering sophomore novel...the untimely disclosure of a secret shared between two teens from different backgrounds sets off a cascade of heartbreaking consequences ... This novel is notable both for the raw force of Iweala’s prose and the moving, powerful story.
Iweala gives us a novel of keen insight into the mental and emotional turmoil that attends an adolescent's discovery of his sexuality. Unfortunately, the book seems to lose steam toward its conclusion ... This is a deeply felt and perceptive novel that does not fulfill its promise
