Kids who’ve misplaced their mother and father are orphans, wives who’ve misplaced their husbands are widows, and husbands who’ve misplaced their wives are widowers. However there isn’t a phrase to account for the immense, devastating loss of a kid. John Vercher begins Satan Is Superb from this anonymous place, because the unnamed narrator, a struggling author and professor, attends his son Malcolm’s funeral. In distinction to the shortage of phrases for his grief, there are many phrases (some extra acceptable than others) for his racial id: blended, biracial, mulatto, and so on. Inevitably, these two elements of our narrator’s id—the lack of his son and his biracial background—intersect as he finds out he has inherited a plot of land from his estranged grandfather on his white mom’s facet of the household. This land, he quickly finds out, is a former plantation. Wrestling with the racial historical past of the land and the which means of inheriting it, our narrator embarks on a mystical, profound journey into an unraveling id.
When it comes to kind, theme and voice, Satan Is Superb is something however steady. Following the narrator within the first individual, the guide leaps by way of time again to when Malcolm was alive and even to when the plantation was within the palms of the narrator’s ancestor, with interjections from spirits alongside the way in which. One among Vercher’s best technical accomplishments is how stunning and pressing this shifting feels because it provides the reader a fuller, richer image of the id issues haunting the narrator and a greater understanding of how these issues influence all of our lives. Vercher provides no ultimate judgment on the questions of id that he raises: The narrator has an ambiguous relationship to writing “Black” fiction, which he does out of responsibility however finds each fulfilling and contemptible, a torn feeling that each one writers whose work is equally labeled can relate to. This instability and in-betweenness mirrors id itself, that factor we every supposedly have that we are able to by no means actually pin down, that’s all the time altering and may by no means wholly describe us.
