Fiction

Jamel Brinkley, Witness (Farrar, Straus and Giroux), 240 pp. Hardback, $27.00.

What is a witness? A witness has seen something and thus personally carries the evidence, the visual proof. Firsthand experience becomes knowledge, stored in one’s wits (a witless person can’t be a witness), knowledge that can be shared with others. Fundamentally, a witness is someone who can testify, provide a testimony—whether in a courtroom or in a church. In his new story collection, Jamel Brinkley takes a cue from James Baldwin (that other J. B.), who, in an epigraph, observes that there’s a fine line between a witness and an actor.

And a writer, one could add. The choice of the title Witness is an interesting one. It is also the title of the last of the ten pieces in this collection, and that story (first published in The Paris Review in 2020) is perhaps the strongest. So it could be that this is “Witness and Other Stories.” But acts of witnessing appear all across this book, often explicitly labeled as such—from the “living witnesses” of ghosts and paranormal phenomena to a young man’s impression of his late cousin’s conversion from a talented dancer to a drunk dancer: “It’s a scary thing to witness, this transformation of laughter, from an expression of joy you’re helpless against into a weapon deliberately honed and hurled.”

It’s tempting to read Brinkley’s book as a conceptual meditation, something akin to Claudia Rankine’s Citizen. In one story here, “Comfort,” a young woman named Simone struggles to process the death of her brother, who—according to the court’s official narrative—somehow managed to shoot himself in the head while handcuffed in the back of a police cruiser. Aside from the arresting officer, who was found not guilty, there were no witnesses.

But the collection is a much more capacious set of observations regarding the lives of Brinkley’s compelling characters, most of whom live in and around Brooklyn. (The Bed–Stuy neighborhood is the gravitational center of the book.) In fact, what’s most impressive about this work is the multiplicity of perspectives. Stories are told in the past tense and in the present tense. They are conveyed in first-person narration and in third-person narration—and, in one tale (“Blessed Deliverance”), in third-person plural narration (“we”), a technique that blends the voices of five different teenage friends. Privileged perspectives include both those of children and those of adults, those of men and those of women.

Many of Brinkley’s stories feature young or middle-aged men (the author himself is 47), but the most powerful characters in the book are older women. In “The Let-Out,” a young man meets an attractive older woman only to discover, to his horror, that she is the mistress with whom his father once ran away. In “Arrow,” a man’s deceased mother remains in the house as a ghost—and even has sex with her living husband! (The narrator is relatively unsurprised: “According to the terms of her personal lexicon, a woman was a lady only if she was fascinating and ungovernable, and my mother considered herself nothing if not a lady.”) In “That Particular Sunday,” Aaron recalls a childhood visit to a mental hospital, where he learns that he has an additional, institutionalized aunt—and where he hears her unforgettable laughter.

Most memorable is Anita, through whom the narration is focalized in “Bystander,” one of the strongest stories in Witness. The fastidious Anita is disappointed in her unambitious teenage daughter, Dandy, upon whom she forces weight-gain drinks to combat what she fears is an eating disorder. But Dandy, her family discovers, actually has a rare genetic disorder, and Anita’s special drinks have gradually been poisoning her, leading to hospitalization. Is Anita a bad mother? How had she not noticed her daughter’s illness? The doctor speaks to Anita in “an ambivalent tone, both censure and congratulation.” On the one hand, Anita’s homemade “cocktails” nearly gave her daughter a lethal heart attack; on the other hand, they exacerbated Dandy’s rare symptoms enough to secure the diagnosis that will now keep her alive. “It was conceivable to say she had saved Dandy’s life, and it was conceivable as well to say she had nearly killed her.”

This complicated emotional response—what a character in another story refers to as a mix of “gratitude and resentment”—is a hallmark of Brinkley’s technique. Anita, like many, is equally villainous and heroic. “Bystander” was originally published in The Yale Review this summer, but here, in Witness, Brinkley has slightly revised it to bring out Anita’s voice and really get inside her head. It’s a notable improvement to an already excellent story.

Brinkley has established himself as a master craftsman of the short form.

The same could be said of the story “Witness,” which was first published in The Paris Review and is reprinted here with some light touch-ups. But those touches artfully accentuate the narration of Silas, whose sister, Bernice, might have survived an illness if only someone had taken care of her. “Witness” is superb, a work of tremendous skill and talent. If you only read one of Brinkley’s stories, start here.

The house of fiction has a million windows, wrote Henry James. The author, he thought, was a “watcher” of “the human scene.” James would have liked Brinkley, who, in Witness, has built an impressive house of fiction of his own. Little has escaped his observant eye. (“By nature, I’m an observer,” Brinkley has said.) Of course, Brinkley is no mere reporter; his characters also have remarkable depth—“chasms of psyche and memory,” in the words of reviewer Margot Lee. But he is also a respecter of surfaces, zeroing in on what others would overlook. As one of his characters points out, “So much is made about the importance of achieving depth in human interactions, but what about the delicate surface, what about the skin?”

And Brinkley is to be commended for his devotion to the short story. Publishers seem to prefer novels, and short fiction is often considered more demanding on the artist; every sentence must do its work, requiring a precision that eludes careless writers. Following his first, prize-winning collection, A Lucky Man (2018), Brinkley must have felt at least some pressure to produce a novel. But with Witness, his second collection, he has established himself as a master craftsman of the short form.