The Devil Is in the Details

Don’t read Devil Is Fine by John Vercher if you like a clean, straight-line narrative inhabited by characters without any dark or mysterious corners in their personalities.

If you prefer the glow of endless sunshine and a story that ends as neatly as the crustless edges of the finger sandwiches served at the novel’s denouement, this is not the book for you. But if you want fiction that reflects life— messy, perplexing, bewildering, cloudy, and thought-provoking—read on.

As the story begins, an unnamed, biracial writing professor and modestly successful novelist is grieving the recent death of his teenage son, Malcolm. Their relationship had been strained, and the father witnessed his son’s death. Grief, movingly palpable and ever present, is a strong catalyst throughout the novel.

Malcolm was due to inherit land from his white grandfather. As his son’s heir, the father instead receives land that was once a plantation owned by his white ancestors. He decides to sell the property, but in the process the bodies of three enslaved individuals and the plantation owners are discovered and exhumed.

“What lies in the dirt,” the father remarks in an interior dialogue with Malcolm, “…tainted not only by the intangible scars of maliciousness meted, but also by the makings of the men who meted it, the pleasure they took in the inflicting of their afflictions, their supposed superiority expressed by placing you in servitude, and eventually in the ground.”

Significant passages of the ensuing narrative are framed around the father in imagined conversation with his deceased son.

There is precedent for unnamed narrators in African-American literature— think of Ralph Ellison and Invisible Man.

As the narrator tries to find his footing in a world where he and others question his identity—is he Black or white?—the literary device effectively underscores how lost he has become as everything in his life has been torn from him.

The novel’s first sentence grabs the reader’s attention as the narrator addresses Malcolm, already dead: “The morning we buried you, a road flagger danced in the street.” The sentence is direct, unadorned, creating interest and a desire to know more. The next few sentences draw us in emotionally: “My car was two behind your hearse, your mother in the car ahead of me, my mother and father in the vehicle behind.” Vercher, astutely, has subtly posed several key questions to propel the reader into the novel hoping for answers. Why are the mother and father of the deceased son in different cars? How did the son die? What stress exists between the two parents?

Let me also say this up front—John Vercher is a sadist. (He even throws the amputation of a limb into the mix.) This is a good thing in literary fiction. Every novelist privileging character development and worth their weight in perversion and heartlessness must put their main characters through a series of unpleasant events, embarrassing scenarios, and tense kerfuffles, all while walking them through dark passages. This is how an author creates tension and interest to keep us turning the pages.

As readers, we need stress and anxiety to hold our attention. Vercher provides both early and often. While in the funeral procession, “I hyperventilated. Pressure built in my chest…cars in front of me, cars behind me…. I had nowhere to go when an attack came.” Meanwhile, his extended family, many of whom we will later learn lay some measure of blame on the father for the death, impatiently wait.

After his son’s death in a car he was driving, the father throughout the story appears to take some measure of masochistic satisfaction in abruptly ending the few good things in his life: his chance at tenure in the university and firing his literary agent after she expresses enthusiasm over the outline of his next novel. We, as readers, feel for the father because he is likeable, and we feel the pain as he ends his sobriety, mixes alcohol with pills, and effectively erases himself from his prior life.

Vercher employs a touch of magical realism to add depth and context to the drama. Upon learning that one of the three enslaved bodies was a boy, who had fractured bones, the narrator “stepped back, kneeled, and scooped a mound of soil from the edge of the grave, holding it in my palm. ‘What lies in the dirt,’ I whispered, and squeezed the earth. And I was lost.”

At this moment, the narrator slips into a different time period and voice, “I am back in the room without doors, no walls, no way out. Only eyes to the outside, where I hear that voice that is mine, but Not, watching again those pale hands that are mine, but Not, and I watch on in terror, screaming into my prison void, at what those hands hold.” He has gone back in time and entered the mind and actions of the plantation owner, his ancestor, who is beating the enslaved boy to death. It is a horrifying new memory for the traumatized father.

There is irony in the act of exhuming an enslaved boy who died a violent death and the act of burying a son who died violently. This doubling of grief is too much for the narrator: “I was crazy or haunted and either way, I could not be free of them….I craved this quiet because these ghosts would not let me go.”

Devil Is Fine is not a difficult novel to read, though I may have painted a bleak and unnerving picture. The writing is crisp and to the point. The main character is written in a way that we root for him to make the right decisions. We care about him. The story flows logically. It is a thought-provoking book, worth the investment of time to read and ponder.