While the reviews and responses to my novel have generally been very positive, the one criticism that's appeared a few times concerns the book's depiction of African-American characters, particularly its depiction of so-called "street" dialogue. While the book's rendering of such speech has also been praised in a number of reviews, it is clearly something that has bothered at least some reviewers and readers. I thought I would take a shot at discussing it.
Let me say at the outset that I'm not trying to win an argument here: the reading of fiction is a subjective experience, and I believe in that sense the reader is always right. Fiction, like a magic trick, is an attempt to suspend disbelief. If something takes an individual reader out of the flow of the story -- whether that thing is a prose style, an unbelievable plot twist, or what have you -- then the story has been hampered for that reader. But a few (white) people who have criticized this aspect of Cure have suggested that the portrayal of African-Americans in the book is offensive, and I do take real issue with that claim.
Given that my novel is mostly set in the Brooklyn criminal courts and in and around a housing project, it features a diverse cast of characters. Many of those characters are poor African-Americans who grew up in that project. I did my level best to accurately represent those characters, including their speech.
I knew this was a risky proposition. But if you're going to write about something like the Brooklyn criminal courts, you have a fundamental choice: either you avoid issues of race and class, which is the safer route on the one hand but is a false representation of your subject matter on the other, or you explicitly address it. Explicitly addressing it means acknowledging that a disproportionate number of the people swept up in the Brooklyn criminal justice system -- as defendants and as witnesses -- are both poor and people of color.
A fairly explicit theme of Cure is exploring the ways in which the world of the urban criminal courtroom intersects with the world of the streets which provide most of the grist for its mill. Both these worlds have their own rules, their codes of conduct, and their speech. The book is in part an attempt to explore to what extent these two worlds can even hear and understand one another, given these differences.
If you are going to depict characters who are poor, uneducated, and African-American, you either attempt to accurately render so-called "street" speech, in which case you risk creating language which feels off-key, jivey, or worse, or you take the easy-but-false way out by rendering their dialogue in "proper" English. I chose the former, and did my best to accurately reflect that speech.
This is not my native habitat, and I certainly understand that some readers are probably going to be skeptical of my ability to render it accurately. My flap jacket bio probably doesn't help, especially mention of a Yale Law degree. There are plenty of other aspects to my biography that probably would change that perception -- that I'm biracial, that I was born in downtown Detroit. I have done legal work on numerous cases (including murder cases) which contained racial and class dynamics such as those depicted in the book. Although I wasn't raised in New York City, I've lived here for most of my adult life, and the various rhythms of the city's speech feel deeply ingrained in me.
In other words, I do have some actual lived experience relating to the world I'm writing about. Considerably more, I strongly suspect, then those who have criticized my depiction of it. (I was struck, for example, by the suggestion in the Times review that the book's presentation of the drug trade and the urban underclass showed a familiarity with the work of sociologist Sudhir Venkatesh, as if the only way a writer could know about such things was through reading scholarly works about them, rather then actual experience.)
If part of the issue some readers have with the book's black characters arises from an innate suspicion that some Ivy League guy in a suit wrote the novel, then maybe knowing more of my own background might change how readers respond to the black characters in my book. I don't think it should matter, except to the extent that preconceived notions of who the author is effect a reader's experience of the genuineness of the book. What does and should matter is the words on the page, and how a reader responds to them. If the depiction of the characters ring false to a reader, then I didn't do my job as experienced by that reader.
In any event, the novel's attempt to render the diversity of contemporary Brooklyn goes well beyond the housing project. That includes people of color who are every bit as educated and articulate as the narrator -- one of the prosecutors, the victim's roommate, etc. Personally, I feel that much American fiction, especially literary fiction, is far too insular, tales by the upper middle class for the upper middle class that fail to engage with the social dynamics of modern American life. I tried to write a work of social fiction that seriously engaged with issues of race and class without being dogmatic or heavy-handed. I obviously didn't succeed with all readers -- an impossible goal to meet, but a worthy one to have.
