A Life Awry

The Book of Harlan by Bernice L. McFadden delivers on many levels.

It is a sweeping historical novel spanning most of the 20th century. A winner of the American Book Award, it’s about truth and resilience. It mines commonplace happenings in the lives of the characters to reveal our shared histories. It features the most unlikeable titular creation whom I could not help but root for. I read all 352 pages in two sittings.

McFadden tells the story of Harlan Elliott, a Black man born in the South (based on Harold Isaac McFadden, the author’s paternal grandfather). Elliott is shaped by both the environment of the time and his life choices. He is imperfect, mercurial, alcoholic, musically brilliant, devoted to his family and friends, and one of the unluckiest bastards you’ll ever read about. One of McFadden’s great achievements is interweaving his story within the context of the larger political environment in the United States and beyond. She does not shy away from the harsh reality of being Black in America, but life abroad also goes terribly awry.

The novel begins in 1915 in Macon, Georgia. Harlan is born to Sam and Emma Elliott, who promptly leave him with her strict and religious parents as they seek work in a series of large Northern cities. A few years later, Sam and Emma come for Harlan after settling in Harlem. Over time, Harlan proves to be a gifted jazz guitarist after overcoming barriers beyond his control (his race and inexperience) and self-imposed (a habit of arriving late for rehearsals). He matures and finds his way into the jazz clubs of New York City.

The next logical step might have been touring the United States with bands, but Harlan chooses not to subject himself to the segregated nation and brutal Jim Crow laws. Instead, a club owner in Paris offers opportunity and an escape. But World War II is underway, and the Germans cross the border to occupy France even as Harlan spends endless nights playing music, smoking weed, guzzling alcohol, and feeling untouchable. He is not. The Germans begin to round up anyone who doesn’t fit the Aryan ideal. Not only Jews, but Black people as well. After a scuffle with German officers, Harlan is imprisoned in the Buchenwald concentration camp.

McFadden details the awful rigors of the camp in direct and sparse language. “October swooped down on Buchenwald like a famished crow, gobbling up all the summer flowers. Within weeks, the green leaves of the red beech trees faded to brown, curled, and drifted to the ground. Every day more prisoners were killed or died. Every day new ones arrived.” Note the imagery and metaphors. Crows appear, omens of death and the afterlife. The October cold is similarly murderous—green leaves turn brown, “curled” as a rotting corpse after days left in the sun, as bodies are left to rot in the inner courtyard of Buchenwald. McFadden does not sensationalize this atrocity but rather surrounds it with taut prose and suggestive imagery.

Harlan survives five years at Buchenwald but is deeply damaged, physically and emotionally. His parents, awaiting their son’s arrival by boat in New York City, can’t recognize him: “A jumbo-sized man with shoulders as broad as an avenue started down the gangplank, pushing a wheelchair…. Emma glanced at the blanket-shrouded person in the chair.” Harlan is so emaciated and weak that he struggles to stand and walk. His mental state is dark and hallucinatory, and he fights against violent impulses to harm himself and others.

In one of the most wrenching sections of the novel, McFadden details the emotional toll on Harlan after his release. Over five years, he barricades himself in his bedroom and only sporadically interacts with his parents or the one friend, John Smith, who attempts to help. “It wasn’t a thing he could tell people. Not his mother, father, or John Smith. If he even hinted at what he was seeing, the things he thought about doing to himself and others— well, it would mean a straitjacket and rubber room for him.”

Despite the horrors its protagonist endures, The Book of Harlan positions the resilience of the human spirit as a crucial theme. Harlan is unwaveringly persistent in pursuing self-expression through his music in a world of institutionalized racism. His survival at Buchenwald is not due to any singular grandiose act or plan, but rather gritty endurance each day. McFadden does not shy from her character’s failings—his drug and alcohol abuse, his misogyny—but his sheer tenacity had me hoping for the best.

Much of this story’s resonance comes not only from the dramatic periods of Harlan’s life but also from the quieter moments. McFadden sketches them movingly—Harlan alone in his bedroom, teaching himself to play the guitar; years later, finally free, sitting alone on a park bench, inhaling the beauty of the scenery. These moments bring us into his interior thoughts and emotions. We feel and sense him thinking and reacting, trying to construct a path forward.

This novel is a thing of beauty, and I won’t spoil the ending, which is neither neat nor complete. It is unforeseen and powerful, with plot twists so sharp and severe that they threatened to snap my neck, underscoring the cruelty and complexity of an existence in which moments of joy and resolution balance the suffering.