"If I survive you" by Jonathan Escoffery

An audio book of linked stories.

• "Influx" - Trelawny was born in America and goes to school there. All his relatives are Jamaican. He's light enough to be mistaken for a Porto-rican. In the mid-West he's black. When he's 13 his father and big brother leave.
• "Under the Ackee Tree" - Sonia tells him things have to change? Someone must take Jordi and baby back? Jamaican English?
• "Odd Jobs" - he's been living in his car. He applies for a one-off job where he has to punch a girl - it's art. Her parents arrive at a bad moment. His dad gave money to his brother Delany for his Tree Service company.
• "Pestilence" - the boys, Trelawny and Delano, clear the area of bugs
• "Splashdown" - Cukie (Lennox Stanton), 13, is going to see his father Ox who suddenly wants to make contact. Daphne is the mother. Ox shows him how to fish. Cukie wants to know if his father's a good man. Years pass. Cukie's penniless when his child is born. He tracks down his father. He discovers that he's made a girl pregnant, that he's rich, and that his old friend Happy suddenly disappeared. He finds out that Ox and Happy got involved with drug dealing. Cukie threatens to go to the police if Ox doesn't give him $10k. He does. At the end Cukie's in the sea - "behind Ox, the sun is still making its ascent. If Cukie reaches out he can almost touch his father's shadow in the water"
• "Independent living" - His job is to check the residents of a place mostly for old refugees and exiles to assess what they can afford. The common languages are Spanish and Russian. He's given bribes. He get hate-mail. Nicolina offers him $1300 to be next on the waiting list. She's young enough for sex bribes to be an option. She says she wants a room because she's friends with a resident. When a resident dies, he offers her the room, but the dead resident is her friend. He returns her money.
• "If he suspected he'd get someone killed this morning, Delano would never leave his couch" - A storm's brewing. Delano (tree surgeon) sees it as a way to get badly needed money. Trouble is his lorry is being held by a repairman he owes money to, and he won't get the tree-cutting contract unless he sleeps with Tina, a manager. Shelly-Anne has left him but he hopes she'll return with his sons. He takes the lorry without permission and he threatens the boss with sexual harrassment to get the contract. There's a fatal accident while his team are doing the tree cutting job. That evening he does a gig. Maybe he could do more.
• "If I survive you" - The 2 sons are living with their father. Delano might get away with the death of his employee. The house is subsiding. The father offers to sell it to Trelawny. He tries to raise money - a couple (black female, white male) celebrating their 10th want him to take movies of them having sex - later the wife wants sex with him. His girlfriend might be able to raise some money, but her (Cuban?) parents are anti-black. Delano finds out that insurance will cover the legal costs, and he's going to enter the band competition. This is enough for the father to offer him the house. Trelawny imagines causing trouble at the competition and getting arrested. Then he thinks he and his father should somehow make up.

Other reviews

• Ian Williams (The most striking stylistic feature is the second-person point of view, couched within an urgent present tense, though occasionally accessorised by long stretches of a conditional/future tense or Jamaican English. ... Obviously, the second person brokers empathy between reader and character – you put yourself in Trelawny’s shoes. Less obviously, because you essentially stands in for I, it confirms the estrangement Trelawny feels from himself. He cannot convincingly narrate from the I position because that would presume that he inhabits a self.)
• Maureen Corrigan (The parents, Topper and Sanya, fled Jamaica in the 1970s, desperate to escape political violence ... In a standout story called "Splashdown )
• Lynn Steger Strong (Throughout the stories we track the same basic outline of his life: His dad starts a contracting business, with limited success; Hurricane Andrew hits; the family goes up to Fort Lauderdale; Dad starts to get more work; Dad moves back to Miami, to the house he’s rebuilt, but the parents decide to split and to also split the kids. Dad chooses Trelawny’s brother, Delano, instead of him. Eventually Trelawny goes to the Midwest for college ... But the book suffers a bit from having to let each story feel stand-alone, even as they largely tread the same short span of time. Getting the same backstory sketched out in so many stories, I did wonder whether there was a novel in its bones. ... In the end, the book tells us — and I almost wished it didn’t — who the “you” is. The last line gives us an idea of how to survive)