What makes a family? How is it defined and by whom? Is freedom for everyone? In Necessary Fiction, Eloghosa Osunde poses these questions while exploring the paths and dreams, hopes and fears of more than two dozen characters who are staking out lives for themselves in contemporary Nigeria.
Necessary Fiction is singular because it subtly transposes an idea that recurs in queer media—that families are both essential and malleable—to a broader tapestry of human lives ... It offers...a vision of how kinship might evolve for everyone in a world of increasing mobility, urbanization, and atomization ... Osunde also reminds the reader how deeply vulnerable, and deeply restorative, conversations among family members can be when they’re sustained through loyalty and mutual respect.
An immersive experience ... Inventively bold and affecting, its obsessions go deep but are crystal clear ... With its nonexistent plot and shifting points of view, [this book] is packed with dozens of multifaceted characters that are hard to keep track of.... Not exactly a slog but definitely not a breeze of a read.
While many of the familial dynamics in this book are messy and unhealthy, Osunde’s occasional shifts to the parental viewpoint allow a more complex and humane picture to emerge. We see how care is mixed with shame and repressed desire ... Osunde is brilliant at character, giving the cast rich, knotty backstories that unfold in bursts of revelation. This novel is notable less for its plot—there isn’t much—than for these moments of epiphany. It is bracing to encounter queer people reckoning so candidly with insecurities unique to their experience ... The focus on the characters’ sexual identities can, however, feel totalizing, allowing for little in the way of development that does not centre in some way on their queerness.
