If you haven’t already heard of Jesse McCarthy, you soon will be! This Harvard professor and popular essayist has two books publishing this year. His essay collection, WHO WILL PAY REPARATIONS ON MY SOUL?, released in March, and now his debut novel, THE FUGITIVITIES, is racking up starred reviews left and right. His essays demonstrate a curiosity and breadth of interests and knowledge that make them invigorating to read, tackling issues from R&B music to the writings of Toni Morrison, and demonstrating a rigorous commitment to expanding and experimenting with what’s possible in the essay form.

It is perhaps not surprising, then, that McCarthy’s latest book is equally ambitious in its scope and allusive in nature, offering references to everything from European cinema and architecture to the NBA, all couched in a rather unusual quest narrative that’s really a coming-of-age novel at its heart.

"Reading [THE FUGITIVITIES] should be approached like an open-ended airline ticket. Readers can anticipate long and rich conversations, unexpected destinations, and perhaps a fair amount of wandering in the company of McCarthy’s protagonist."

The protagonist, Jonah Winters, is a young Black man, a recent college graduate living with a roommate in New York City. It’s the waning years of the George W. Bush presidency, and growing desires for activism and calls to address “the situation” are gaining strength. As McCarthy outlines, however, no one has any clear idea of what “the situation” is, let alone how to fix it: “‘The situation’ was everything and nothing in particular. Even though the friends almost never agreed on why, or what, it meant, or what was to be done about it, they agreed and mutually reinforced each other’s opinion that something had gone fundamentally wrong. It was in everything. Language and manners, gestures and traditions, entire understandings could be hollowed out overnight.”

Jonah, who grew up in Paris and consequently has had a different experience than many of his peers about what it means to be young and Black in America, nevertheless finds himself living out what many assume to be his destiny now that he has graduated from college and aspires to make change in the world: teaching in a public school in New York City. Jonah has no particular pedagogical interest or aptitude, and when an old acquaintance suggests that he accompany him on a South American odyssey to reconnect with an old friend, Jonah delays making a decision. But when, after an ex-NBA player named Nathaniel Archimbald rescues Jonah from a likely drunk and disorderly citation, the two share a long and confessional conversation --- and Nathaniel gives Jonah a letter to pass along to Nathaniel’s long-lost love, Laura, whom he believes to be somewhere in Uruguay.

Spurred by Nathaniel’s stories (and a well-timed inheritance), Jonah agrees to accompany his friend to South America. There he discovers danger, beauty and perhaps the hand of fate --- all while still trying to figure out what, if anything, awaits him on his return to New York.

THE FUGITIVITIES is an unusual novel, and readers who come to it expecting a traditional quest narrative or a clear-cut denouement probably would be better served elsewhere. Reading it should be approached like an open-ended airline ticket. Readers can anticipate long and rich conversations, unexpected destinations, and perhaps a fair amount of wandering in the company of McCarthy’s protagonist. The journey is one in which both the past and the future become unstable and uncertain, making the book best enjoyed by sinking into the ruminative prose and savoring the ride.