“The Disappearers,” the intimate but sprawling novel by Marlon James, opens with journal entries from Eddy Porteus, a middle-class student in Kingston, Jamaica in 1988. But Eddy’s defining characteristic is that he’s gay – it defines him because if his family found out, he might be disowned and if anyone else did, he might be beaten or murdered.
Eddy is secretly rehearsing for a play about prison life and gay sex, where he is entranced by one castmate, Matt Chin, and challenged by another, Jordan Brown, who has been kicked out of his family, forced to drop out of school and now lives in his car and does sex work to support himself. The play is directed by an older man named Havelock Titus, who is determined to make Kingston face some truths.
This opening section is a sharp and funny coming-of-age story filled with literary and pop culture references close to James’ heart. “It’s very much a gay book, but it’s also a love letter to Gen X,” said the Booker Prize-winning author of “A Brief History of Seven Killings,” who grew up in Jamaica but now lives in Brooklyn.
The story turns violent in the second section when a mob learns about the play, and the rest of the book explores the aftermath and how the trauma scars everyone involved.
This interview, conducted via Zoom, was edited for length and clarity.
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Q. Your characters and stories lead you to places you weren’t expecting. How did that play out with “The Disappearers”?
A good writing day for me is me saying, “I didn’t see that coming.”
I usually don’t know where my books are going to end when I write them, and maybe that’s why they’re so long. I usually have a basic idea, and then research leads to what the story is going to be. I didn’t really experience a lot of stuff that I wrote about, so it was all discovery and a surprise. When I say this book is personal, it’s because I’d take things that happened in my life and throw it to one of the characters to see how they would react to it. I remember thinking, “If I’m caught buying Prince’s “LoveSexy, ‘ I’m going to be stoned to death,” and I gave that to Eddy.
But I didn’t know what the dynamic would be when characters met each other and where their trajectories would go. When you start to know them and realize what would be in character or out of character, then it goes in all these surprising directions.
Q. Jordan is filled with rage about homophobia and the terrors of anti-gay violence in his section. Do you still feel that anger or were you revisiting it for the book?
I felt it a lot later than Jordan. I was listening to homophobic hip-hop all the way into my 40s before I thought, “Why am I loving music that hates me?”
So I still have a lot of anger, and I wasn’t shy with letting the anger flow. I get the whole idea about having perspective, but I think it’s sometimes overrated and the raw nerve is important.
Q. You also show the danger in the anger.
Jordan thinks there’s power in it and that it’s self-sustaining. It gives him a strength he needs at first, but it’s almost kind of immature and after a while it comes with a cost.
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Q. After the first section, you switch from the intimacy of Eddy’s journal to a swirl of shifting voices of the mob. It creates a sense of chaos. Was it tricky to figure out how much to explain and to show?
It couldn’t be a one-person narrative because I wanted to keep the chaos, and I wanted people to realize that within the mob are individual people. There have been so many gay men and trans women murdered and lesbians raped by mobs in Jamaica, and the people all just vanish into anonymity.
We have this idea that a mob becomes one beast and people can’t control their emotions anymore. There is something to group frenzy and it being infectious, but everybody had a choice to be in that room and their own selfish reasons for doing what they did, so I was calling bull on the mob excuse. At every turning point, even if you have done something already, you can leave.
But it’s no coincidence that it’s a shorter section. It was originally twice as long. Even for me, there’s so much I can take. I didn’t want to inhabit anybody too long.
Q. Your books often contain sex and violence, but did this one feel different?
I get a bad rap as the violence guy. I think the violence just echoes because people suffer in my books for it – you almost have to always err on the side of showing too much because if it feels acceptable, you’re probably selling the victims’ suffering short.
But this is different.
In “Brief History,” violence is a means to an end and is how people assert dominance and their masculinity, but the characters are inflictors of violence. In “The Disappearers,” the characters are the victims of violence. It was important for me to focus on what happens when you’re on the receiving end.
This is the darkest book I’ve ever written, but it also feels like my most tender book. And it was very important to me that characters survive it. That’s a rarity in a Marlon James novel. People usually don’t make it to the end.
Los Angeles Public Library’s ALOUD Series: Marlon James in conversation with Darnell L. Moore
When: 7 p.m., Sept. 16
Where: Mark Taper Auditorium – Central Library, 630 W 5th St., LA
Information: www.eventbrite.com/e/marlon-james-the-disappearers-registration-1993487835780
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