Greenland by David Santos Donaldson is an excellent treatise on how an author finds his voice. The premise of writing about E.M. Foster and his Egyptian lover connects the complex twists beautifully. My only complaint was the way the novel gets into magical realism, not my favorite genre. ( )

Greenland by David Santos Donaldson is yet another novel based on a part of E.M. Forster’s life. Here it is Forster’s love affair with a young Egyptian, Mohammed el Adl.

Of the Forster based novels I read so far, to me this one is the weakest. I did appreciate the historical accuracy about this relationship that took place in Alexandria. And I see the similarities in the two storylines, one in early 20th century Egypt, the other in nowadays New York City and Greenland. The relationship between a black man and an older white man, the racism both Mohammed and Kip, the main narrator, have to deal with.
And Like Mohammed did with Forster, Kip tests his white lover and they both fail.

But it all felt overly constructed to me. Kip is going through some angst ridden feverish period while trying to write his first novel. To me it felt like I was inside the mind of someone who is psychotic, which I found unpleasant. And the final part where Kip ends up in Greenland and where Donaldson tries to weave together the characters of Mohammed and Kip, felt like an attempt to be overly literary which I didn’t buy from this debut.

That said, the prose itself was good and easy to read and I will certainly try another novel by this author if he writes one. But this book will be shelved and remain there, not to be reread.

I was really intrigued by the premise of this book: Kip is writing a novel about E.M. Forster and his love affair with a Black man in Egypt, and because he himself is a Black man in a relationship with a white man, he sees a lot of parallels between his own life and the story he is writing.

Unfortunately, the book's execution is extremely heavy-handed and rather clumsy. I think Donaldson is aiming for magical realism, but misses the mark so that the narrator just comes across as insane.

I was disappointed by the lack of novel-within-a-novel. My main reason for picking this book up is that I like E.M. Forster and was interested in the story of him and Mohammed el Adl, but their story gets very little time in this book. The pieces of novel-within-a-novel that we get just barely add up to a short story, let alone a novel, and although the parallels between the two different stories are very clear, I didn't really feel like the Forster/Mohammed story contributed much to the main storyline. ( )

In Greenland, David Santos Donaldson offers us a central character, Kip (short for Kipling) Starling, whose sudden swings in moods and thinking reflect his experience living as a gay black writer in the U.S. in a longterm relationship with a white man, racing against a three-week deadline to rewrite a novelization of E.M. Forster's love affair Mohammed el Adl, a black man living in Egypt during the struggle for Egyptian independence, so that the novel is presented from el Adl's perspective rather than Forster's. And there's the part about locking himself in a basement and boarding up the door so he can't do anything but write, and the part about what turns out to be a journey to Greenland, though that isn't the destination he was originally headed toward. Also, what may or may not be hallucinations.

To say that Greenland is not a tidy novel would be an immense understatement. But that's the point. Kip is struggling to live fully as himself in a society determined not to see him clearly and only minimally interested in what he has to say as a writer. Not tidy. Chaos.

This makes for a novel that is demanding of its readers. As you'll see if you peruse the reviews for Greenland, some show readers embracing Greenland's chaos, appreciating its complicated truths and contradictions, and some show other readers walking away from the novel and the demands it makes upon them. I'm not trying to depict a dichotomy here between "good" readers who get the novel and "bad" readers who don't. I'm just saying that either you'll find the payoff from reading Greenland sufficient or you won't.

At times, I did experience reading Greenland as work—but I also experienced it as revelatory with a breadth of vision that challenged me to see Kip's world in totality, rather than just letting me take a stroll down one of the many trajectories he travels simultaneously. If you share my literary inclinations, you'll be carrying this novel along inside yourself for a long time to come, turning bits and pieces over in your mind and exploring all the different ways they can be put together.

I received a free electronic review copy of this title from the publisher via NetGalley; the opinions are my own. ( )

Rating: 4.25* of five, rounded down for stylistic infelicities

The Publisher Says: A dazzling, debut novel-within-a-novel in the vein of The Prophets and Memorial, about a young author writing about the secret love affair between E.M. Forster and Mohammed el Adl—in which Mohammed's story collides with his own, blending fact and fiction.

In 1919, Mohammed el Adl, the young Egyptian lover of British author E. M. Forster, spent six months in a jail cell. A century later, Kip Starling has locked himself in his Brooklyn basement study with a pistol and twenty-one gallons of Poland Spring to write Mohammed's story.

Kip has only three weeks until his publisher's deadline to immerse himself in the mind of Mohammed who, like Kip, is Black, queer, an Other. The similarities don't end there. Both of their lives have been deeply affected by their confrontations with Whiteness, homophobia, their upper crust education, and their white romantic partners. As Kip immerses himself in his writing, Mohammed's story—and then Mohammed himself—begins to speak to him, and his life becomes a Proustian portal into Kip's own memories and psyche. Greenland seamlessly conjures two distinct yet overlapping worlds where the past mirrors the present, and the artist's journey transforms into a quest for truth that offers a world of possibility.

Electric and unforgettable, David Santos Donaldson's tour de force excavates the dream of white assimilation, the foibles of interracial relationships, and not only the legacy of a literary giant, but literature itself.

I RECEIVED THIS DRC FROM THE PUBLISHER VIA EDELWEISS+. THANK YOU.

My Review: I don't think anyone on Earth could've wanted to love this book more than I did. I'm in an intergenerational Black/white gay relationship. I am the very epitome of this debut novel's audience!

And here's the four-plus-star review to tell you why; and where it fell short for me.

Start with the pace. Kip(ling, as in the white Empire apologist) is Black, his lover...a strange hybrid of presence and absence...is white. Kip's main focus in the novel he needs to write in three weeks to meet his deadline is E.M. Forster's Black Egyptian lover, Mohammed's, treacherous path to being with an older white man. That needs set-up...but almost the first quarter of the book? It was drawn-out and in view of the excitement potential of this tale of discovery and personal growth through identification with Otherness, sapped the energy out of the tale for this reader.

Next, the sexuality...I am a lifelong admirer of and votary to the phallus, but good gravy, the erections and the spontaneous orgasms in here are, um, over the top. You should forgive. I'm also, as a survivor of maternal incest, permaybehaps a bit oversensitive to the juxtaposition of sexuality and those who really should be too young for such to occur to them. I accept, though, that this isn't done by the author for a lascivious purpose but as a fact of a certain kind of life. Still squicked me out.

But the core, the beating heart of the book, is the quest to be one's own power, to set one's own course, when Black and Other. Ben (Kip's lover) wants badly to be supportive, yet can't help but be a force for assimilation. No one white can help that. It's a fact of racist society...that we exist in our privilege is enough for us to exert metaphysical gravity towards that end. The fact that Mohammed is in love with a man of great public eminence means he's under even greater assimilationist pressures. And let's face it, the assimilation can never be complete or seamless. One's skin color is not subject to change.

Kip's literary efforts are to deliver an acceptable manuscript. To a publisher, white. Who might, or might not, care to read, sign, publish his work...he has to do this. And he's got his companion, Mohammed, in his semblance of ever-increasing corporeality, as a guide, a distraction, a hectoring nuisance of a muse. Upstairs, he's got his loving, exasperated, uncomprehending white lover Ben.

This is the way we're going to go...through the hard, scary, fiercely fought battlefields of love and relationship and the deep dependence we all have on the illusion of the world we carry in our heads. Ben's illusions about marriage to the creative and exciting Kip didn't include the hard, slogging reality of living with a writer's frequent descents into insanity. Kip's fantasy of the way white privilege works was that it was transitive, like so many other senses of the verb "to fuck". One of them, dear Kip, is "to fuck over" and that is what Kip's fears and senses are telling him is happening. His embodied Blackness in Mohammed, the muse and weirdly corporeal fantasy, is there to tell him how getting fucked is only fun if it's not "over," and that's what the white men they truly love are inevitably going to do.

Well, there's something in that...there's no relationship that has perfect parity of partners, and there's a lot fewer relationships that have both Black and white men in them that get too close to that fantasy of parity. It's a tough enough thing to get the whole world's ideas about men in love with each other..."who's the woman? is what they say about Black men true?"...out of your bed, then you've got to get it out of your head. That's where things just crash for most people I've known who are in these relationships. Ben and Kip are separated by the powerful pull of ease.

Ben's crash comes while Kip's at his most vulnerable, and his most destructive. Ben looks into the void of Kip's unfillable maw of need, validation and identity and control and power and acceptance and love, and realizes "I can't do that...I can't be that." This being the nature of intimate relationships, Kip simply stalls out when he is Seen and abandoned on the existential level by the man he wanted to save him. Mohammed, the fantasy of Blackness and betrayed Otherness, and Kip have to make a run for it, or else be consumed into invisibiliy.

These struggles are, I suppose it pays to say out loud here, basic human ones. They're not different for different people, no matter their manifold other oppositions. What they represent is the endless, victoryless battle to be better at being yourself in a world that does not care in the tiniest degree about you. And what Kip must do is see that battle through. What makes his battle relatable, we've established in its basics. What makes it unique is Kip's thriving, driving need to create. And Ben? He isn't there in that battle. So Kip's on the field by himself. With Mohammed's fantastical, corporeal shade. That betrayed and abandoned, bitterly wounded, foully abused Black body is what Kip's life needs to incorporate because it is the very center of his Jungian Selfness.

The final scenes of Greenland, taking place with Black men in cold, searing whiteness, are some of the most profound explications of the Union of the Self I've ever read. And, faithful to Chekhov's gun rule, the ending of the novel is the end. The true end.

Remember, though, that all endings are also beginnings. ( )