When he was born, Harlan’s grandmother described him as lazy. The omniscient narrator hypothesized that Harlan was just grabbing some rest as if he knew what was going to happen to him when he became an adult. Over the course of Bernice L. McFadden’s The Book of Harlan, I learned that both were a bit true. Harlan doesn’t so much blunder through life as travel through it with a sign on his back asking the universe to fuck with him. That invisible sign is the only way to explain why Harlan’s life is so god-awful.
We don’t meet Harlan right away, which is a little surprising given the title of the book. Instead, we are introduced to his mother, Emma, and her thwarted dreams of being a blues pianist right before World War I. After his birth, Emma and her husband, Sam, leave baby Harlan with her parents while they chase her dream. When Emma finally surrenders, she reclaims her son and settles the family in Harlem. Harlan is not happy about his move north until he discovers a small talent for playing the guitar.
If Harlan had been more devoted to nurturing that little talent, none of what happens to him during the Second World War and after would have happened. There are a lot of those moments in The Book of Harlan, where a character in Harlan’s life thinks about what might have been if they hadn’t run into him. If Lizard hadn’t become Harlan’s friend and joined his band, they never would have ended up in Paris on a night when Nazis were rounding people up to send to the concentration camps. If Harlan hadn’t gotten a taste for pot while touring with his mother’s friend, he wouldn’t have been in prison for possession. Everything happens for a reason in The Book of Harlan and that reason is bad luck.
Because of the title, I expected a book that would show me a character from the inside out. This is not what I got. Instead, I got to learn Harlan the way his family and friends get to know him: by bumping into him at various points in his life. We’re never taken inside his mind. We can only infer what’s going on in there and I found this frustrating. I never learned what made the man tick, which contributed to my sense of Harlan’s directionless, uninspired path through most of his life. While I frequently sympathized with him, I was mostly exasperated with Harlan.
It’s entirely possible that I’m missing the point of The Book of Harlan. After all, it won this year’s American Book Award. There’s got to be something in there to get. Perhaps it was the title giving me false expectations. Perhaps it was Harlan himself. This book didn’t quite work for me, although I enjoyed the peripheral characters quite a bit. They’re why I stuck with the book through to the end. Readers who want to know what the hell happens to Harlan in this book might want to just ignore that title and let themselves wander through the story the way its protagonist does through life.