I may be obstinate, obtuse, obscurantist and !RAY-CIST! (Even if I say so myself). To paraphrase an old Hip-Hop Tune, I got 99 problems...
Play my favorite country song backwards, and I get the wife, the kids, the huntin' dawg, and the double-wide back. As a bonus, I'm no longer stoned on Gentleman Jack. But one problem I don't have is figuring out who the heck I am. I come in two colors - white and red. The red typically shows up first and brightest above the collar of my shirt after I spend an afternoon handling the yard work. For my problems, limitations, and shortcomings I am blessed. I know them well and can deal with them with a certain resigned equipoise. I know exactly what God made me.
In the novel Loving Day by Matt Johnson, we meet an anti-heroic protagonist named Warren Duffy who is far less lucky. This poor man is the offspring of diversity. Dad was white, mom was black, the offspring was somewhat ambiguous. He had run away from that background and now he was forced into facing it. His wife, his previous sexual partners and his chosen avocation were all attempts to exit. Then his wife divorces him, his comic shop fails and his dad dies and leaves him a total winner of an inheritance. A partially burned, money pit of a house in the "troubled" Germantown neighborhood of Philly. The guy has a hostile divorce, a toxic inheritance, from a sub-par dad and arrives home to meet...his illegitimate teenage daughter. You could be more completely screwed. If you were Xaviera Hollander.
White society has no truck with this man. They put his books that he writes in the "Urban" section. This is far more urbane and socially acceptable than Knee-Grow. Pure black society is only marginally better. They take him in begrudgingly. They trust him as far as The British Army really trusted Benedict Arnold. Other so-called mixed people refer to him as "Sunflower." This is a term for a mixed-race person who is yellow on the outside and brown in the middle.
This lack of identity causes everyone around him to pigeon-hole him in the least advantageous category they can. Duffy fights against this. He owns up to fathering a daughter as a teenager and tries to salvage her life before it becomes as big a dumpster fire as his own. He even attempts to use this mess as a vehicle to figure just who in the hell he actually is. I'll let you read the novel and figure out how Loving Day comes into the story.
Johnson tells an exceptional story. His ungodly screw up of a protagonist nukes everything in his path like the Chernobyl Reactor. The initial thing that prevents you from hating The Lamentable Mr. Duffy as a villain is the fact that he is so utterly screwed up that he doesn't even understand how to get out his own way. He is a man betrayed, embittered and abandoned by every person in his life he had any expectation of love and support from.
The best he ever gets is tolerated. It's as if a great, united rainbow coalition of black, mixed and even Caucasoid humanity have all reached a grand accord. Namely an accord that reads "Warren Duffy ain't my Knee-Grow." If I ever played a Half-Orc character in an AD&D game, Warren Duffy's attitude towards this mess would be a great role-playing shtick.
Duffy's ultimate enlightenment seems to be that he is what he is and he's just got to suck it up and make a positive difference anyway. It's a mature triumph of masculine humility and existential patience. Not a lot of human beings could pull this off. Duffy grows on you as he buckles his pith helmet and deals with his problems rather than running for Exit.
On a sociological level this novel is a Red Pill Chemotherapy course. Everything that is wrong in this man's life can be at least partially traced back to 1st and 2nd order effects from Swirling. His confused teenage sexuality, his abortion of a marriage and his bastard offspring that returns from his past like a bad acid flashback are all in some way the products of unsuccessful swirl relationships that blow up in his face like an improperly handled Claymore Mine. Duffy is a Greek Hero condemned to torture by the hubris of casual interracial sex where neither partner really thinks through or plans for what they are getting into.
Duffy becomes a metaphor. Not the model biracial British Princess, but instead he is the discarded chaff. A Post-Modern Miniver Cheevy who is cast loose in an urban wilderness. I have an unpleasant feeling that a large majority of the mixed race children in Amerika are more Warren Duffy than Disney Princess. How much easier it would be for him to succumb to his desires to burn the family house down, take the insurance cash and drink himself to enstupidation on some beach near Aruba.
What percentage of the real-world people in Warren Duffy's shoes want to do the exact same thing? I'm guessing it's pretty high. What percentage of these people have that divine, protagonist spark of goodness that exists to keep me from putting this novel down? I'm guessing that this number is pretty small. The ratio of the strong and heroic to the weak and hurting suggests a very bad and negative mathematics to swirling.
Matt Johnson tells a brilliant, funny and precautionary tale. His empathy for Warren Duffy is infectious. You feel that he deserves a certain justice for his fecklessness but that it should be leavened with the proper mercy that God offers to the sinner. It is not all his fault. But it is his responsibility. When Warren Duffy mans up and eats the loses he gains something else. He emerges from the chaotic swirl to be someone with a respectable masculine identity who is actually worth being. Maybe that is an aspiration our confused and dying culture in the western world can actually aspire towards.
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