What we're reading: 'Everywhere You Don't Belong'

Gabriel Bump novel captures African-American life in Chicago

A Chicago bookstore touts that “Black lives matter” and “Black stories matter,” like Gabriel Bump’s “Everywhere You Don’t Belong.” (One Illinois/Ted Cox)

By Ted Cox

For those seeking to understand life in Chicago’s African-American community — the recent protests and looting, the resilience and anger, the endurance and frustration — try a new novel.

Released earlier this year, Gabriel Bump’s “Everywhere You Don’t Belong” proved prescient in capturing the love-hate spirit behind the recent unrest. A first novel and, on the surface, a traditional Buildungsroman as a coming-of-age story concerning a young man growing up in Chicago’s South Shore neighborhood, it is anything but conventional.

It’s been praised for its humor, but it’s a dark humor, and one of the best things about it is the way it reflects the emerging consciousness of a sensitive young man who slowly comes to get the joke, but never accepts its underpinnings in social disparity.

Basically, it concerns the family unit formed by Claude McKay Love, a South Shore adolescent abandoned by his parents, along with his grandmother, her longtime gay friend Paul, and another abandoned child they wind up taking in, Janice.

The book is filled with little iconic Chicago details, especially in South Shore, but one of the best is the incident that serves as the last straw in his parents’ marriage. Thrilled by Michael Jordan’s return to basketball and the Bulls in 1995, the father rejects going to a play with the family — an African-American production of “Fiddler on the Roof” — and instead strips down to his underwear and exuberantly takes to the water at 63rd Street Beach, urging the family, “Join me!”

The next day, the mother abandons the family, followed by the father the day after. As Claude has already reflected: “And my life went on like that: people coming and going, valuable things left in a hurry.”

The staccato dialogue is wicked funny throughout — a repeated motif following any terrible incident is the line, “That’s enough culture for one day” — and gleefully profane. Yet the most astute thing about Bump’s writing is the way it suggests Claude’s emerging consciousness. At first, Grandma is a fearsome, erratic presence, with Paul her comic sidekick, but Claude grows to recognize their bitter jokes as an essential coping mechanism.

A familiar device, but totally natural in its effect, is the way the four main characters always seem to be talking at cross purposes. They rarely address each other directly, instead commenting on what’s just happened or what’s been said in a way that acknowledges it without seeming to care about it.

One evening Paul appears at dinner with “a fresh bruise on his face.”

“‘Who kicked your ass?’ Grandma asked.

“‘Love is a beast,’ Paul said to Janice and me.”

It’s as if their comments are ricocheting off each other, as if they’re all suffering from various manifestations of Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder, in which incidents are acknowledged but never really register.

At one point, Grandma tells Claude, “You’re the best person in this house. … That’s not saying much. But it is saying something.”

“What’s it saying?” Claude says.

“It’s saying enough,” she says. And then immediately turns to Paul, who’s warming up with some nunchuks to deal with another romantic entanglement (“I’m too deadly with a knife,” he’s explained), and orders, “Give me those!”

Paul responds, “This is an island of despair!”

“How much ass am I going to have to kick today?” Grandma says, and Bump adds, “Grandma sounded hollow. Like there was a part deep inside her that wasn’t working right.”

The novel creates a fictional riot in South Shore that nonetheless seems familiar from recent unrest in the city, in which gangs and cops face off, with residents caught in the middle. (There were reports in the wake of recent protests that gangs were protecting the neighborhood of Pilsen.)

Bump has Claude muse on the incident, in which he was separated from Janice and their friends: “Now, all these years later, all my inner chaos remains hard to decipher. Why didn’t I join her and Jimmy and Annette? Why was I stranded? I couldn’t move. Why? Did I feel trapped by history, between two violent wrongs? There was no available peace.”

And then this hypersensitive young man, frozen with dread over much of his life, does act and move, resolving to leave town for college.

“‘Chicago doesn’t want us!’ I yelled. I stood and started for the doorway. ‘The rest of this world isn’t like this. We’re trapped in this toxic bubble and we can’t breathe and we think that’s OK. What’s wrong with us?’”

Grandma tells him, “You’re wrong,” adding, “The entire universe is ruined. … And no one wants us anywhere.”

The second part of the novel, in which Claude heads off to college in Missouri, isn’t quite as successful, as the humor descends into some fairly stereotypical satire, especially in the characters of a bossy editor at the student newspaper and a self-important faculty adviser.

But the first section, set in Chicago, etches a portrait of a city and its residents that is familiar, authentic, and deeply despairing. The saddest thing for a Chicagoan to accept in this clearly autobiographical novel might be found on the dust jacket in Bump’s biographical blurb: this product of Chicago’s South Shore, so stamped with the city’s imprint, got his master’s in fine arts from the University of Massachusetts and now lives in Buffalo, N.Y.