Reviewed by Mireille A. L. Djenno
In 1997, Sean Keith Henry published a short story titled ‘Brother, What’s Wrong?’ The hapless reader of his debut novel will doubtless intone this very question, to which no answer appears forthcoming. A cheap shot perhaps, but such is the register of response provoked by Mr. Henry’s Limbo.
Indeed, in Limbo Henry produces a wholly unlikable cast of characters, none more so than the novel’s “hero.” Trinidadian-born, Pharaoh is a black American man who as a result of a conjugal compromise finds himself in Norway living in the basement apartment of the cottage adjacent to his father-in-law’s home.
In what one assumes is an attempt to create a nuanced character, Henry instead creates self-absorbed priapic bully who forcibly goads his wife and others down his path of sexual wish fulfillment. The book opens with Pharaoh’s Norwegian wife Hannah’s clumsy and coerced induction into the “mile-high club” over the Atlantic, a ham-fisted swipe at questionable symbolism and the beginning of a pattern of contrivance that continues throughout the novel.
The first part of Limbo is concerned with Pharaoh’s adjustment to life in Norway after spending most of his life in Los Angeles. The force of this dislocation however, is mooted by the phenomenon of globalization attendant upon capitalism, itself a major preoccupation of the novel. Displacement is increasingly the reality of many of the world’s citizens and Henry does nothing to make the novel’s cultural “clash” any more resonant than if Pharaoh had moved to rural Wisconsin from California with his multicultural family.
While Mr. Henry’s obvious zeal to create a complex character should be commended, if there is a middle way between characters of unassailable virtue, and those that are grotesquely drawn and otherwise distasteful, Henry has not exerted himself to find it. Pharaoh’s “complexities” are no such thing but rather, an unimaginative configuration of stereotypes – a black man who is pathologically attracted to white women, incapable of sexual fidelity, a recreational narcotics user, unable to hold a job or to articulate his thoughts without a heavy reliance on profanity – set among Norwegian fjords. So it is with no small amount of irony that the reader learns: “He feels a loathing for her [Hannah] and for everyone else in this country who treats him as a racial, sexual stereotype.”
Tension between Pharaoh and his wife arising from his difficulty in adapting to Norwegian culture and family life is further heightened by their struggle to have a second child. However Henry’s insistence on making their relationship operate on almost exclusively sexual terms diminishes the potential of this aspect of the story: “He realizes that their sex afterward is actually an extension of the same argument. It is Hannah’s humiliating way to satisfy her need for his virility, as well as her need to control the final outcome. He resents her for it, and it is becoming increasingly difficult for him to offer her his sperm.”
The novel eventually takes on more than exacerbated family strife. When Pharaoh takes a course to learn Norwegian, he meets an international group of fellow students. For the most part, they remain minor characters – another missed opportunity – and he forms alliances with some of the African-Americans and Africans studying in Norway. Here again, Henry’s convoluted narration, which tries to masquerade as narrative complexity strangles his story. Henry presents a number of interesting possibilities – new and old frames of reference through which Pharaoh’s evolving cultural identity can be understood – but does not seize upon these opportunities, instead allowing characters such as Oobamcee Moubuti, an unaccountably militant Ugandan “I am a displaced warrior…but I will continue to fight the oppressors of my people in my own way”– and their accompanying story lines to clutter the story to no good effect and hobble the overall narrative.
As in his short stories, it is evident in Limbo that Mr. Henry has a lot on his mind. What this novel is ultimately about is difficult to say (and Mr. Henry can be forgiven for trying to make it about too much) but if it is suggestive of the present or future state of intercultural relations, globalization may well be the apocalyptic forerunner feared by many.