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Summary
Part I: Lispenard Street – Chapters 1 & 2
Because Jude and Willem are broke, they’re denied access to even the most modest of New York City apartments, a story their former college roommates, JB and Malcolm, turn comical over a weekly pho dinner. JB has a friend with an apartment, so he connects Jude and Willem to her. JB’s friend flirts with Willem, who is very attractive. The friends have different theories about Willem’s refusal to react to female attention, but Jude believes it is a strategy intended to make him seem less threatening to his male friends. Willem’s primary concern about the apartment is whether it has a working elevator, as Jude has trouble walking. JB returns home for his regular Sunday dinner thinking about how fortunate he is. His Haitian immigrant father died when he was young. His mother has a doctorate in education, and his two childless aunts dote on him. He attended a private school on scholarship and was raised by a loving Haitian grandmother who cooked traditional recipes and sang him French lullabies. Although he is overweight and artistically unsuccessful, JB believes fully in his own talent and revels in his family’s attention.
Willem and Jude move into the apartment on Lispenard Street, but the elevator is broken so they establish an assembly line system. Jude directs and unpacks in the apartment while the others do the heavy lifting. Afterward, Jude and Willem sit together in stunned silence, grateful to have a place of their own, even if it is run down. Jude endures an episode, an intense pain that he must simply ride out, and Willem unpacks a few things to make the apartment more comfortable for them. Willem considers his feelings for Jude, which are complicated because Jude is disabled but will not allow people to help him or talk about it. Willem first saw Jude in pain when they were in college. Since then, he has seen Jude in many types of pain, but Willem has never asked Jude about it or really tried to help him, for which Willem rebukes himself.
JB lives with a group of wealthy artists and does menial work for an art magazine, hoping to get noticed, while he works on a complicated but ill-defined art project involving found hair. JB is proud of his Blackness, while Malcolm is fairly ambivilent about his mixed-race origins, a dichotomy that frequently causes tension between the two of them. Malcolm still lives with his parents. He is 27 and resentful. Mostly he resents his social obligation toward his parents, and their insistence on dropping by his room to chat. When Jude and Flora, Malcolm’s older sister, lived there, life was easier because the burden of chatting was shared. Now JB is alone with his parents and unable to formulate a plan to get his life in order.
JB takes the train to his studio in Long Island City and takes pride in being an immigrant who has risen in social class, although secretly he admits he has nothing in common with the working-class immigrants riding the train with him. His studio space and workmates help him feel like an artist, even though he works in the fairly traditional medium of portraits, whereas the three other artists work with found objects and sculpture in abstract modes that emphasize the acts of creation and destruction. Slowly, JB turns his old college friends into his subject and eventually gets their permission to photograph and paint them, provided they have final say over the works exhibited. Jude proves the most promising subject, as well as the most reluctant, and JB hides his most promising work, taken from a photo that Jude doesn’t know exists.
Willem is a waiter at Ortolan, an elite restaurant employing actors in varying stages of their careers. Willem surveys his coworkers, contemplating his career choice and where he now stands. He doesn’t have JB’s ruthless sense of self-worth or attendant ambition, but Willem likes being kind, and he’s not willing to change that about himself just to get a role. His father was an immigrant ranch hand, and by the time Willem is born, the family has lost three children, while their only other surviving child has cerebral palsy. Willem loves Hemming, plays with him, and takes care of him. When Hemming needs an appendectomy, Willem returns from college to be with him in the hospital, even though he has to borrow the plane fare from Malcolm. His parents insist that he remain at college when Hemming is put on life support, and he forever regrets agreeing and allowing Hemming to die alone. Willem’s parents then die while he is in graduate school.
Malcolm works alongside a group of other young professionals at Ratstar Architects. The careerists make light of their work even as they argue fervently over their artistic philosophies, each working on their own projects much like JB in his studio. Malcolm takes a taxi home, and the driver forces him to remember his own awkward racial identity, which JB especially reviles as he revels in being Black. Malcolm wants to think of himself as past Blackness, past racial identity altogether, but JB insists on treating race as a performance art, refusing for a while in college to speak to anyone who is not a person of color. Malcolm’s family is wealthy, and he has difficulty understanding the types of poverty that people like Jude have endured. But as awkward as he feels about his lack of a racial identity, Malcolm is more distressed by his missing sex life and his failure to make a name for himself as an architect. He chose Ratstar to make his parents happy, declining the more ambitious and riskier firm his friends founded.
Analysis
The first two sections develop three of the novel’s major characters: Malcolm, JB, and Willem. Jude is treated as a minor character, although he later emerges as the novel’s protagonist. It is helpful to compare the four in terms of what the narrator reveals in these early sections. Their respective classes, personalities, and physical natures are relatively straightforward. Willem is strikingly handsome whereas JB is overweight. Willem is kind whereas JB is arrogant. And Willem is a member of the working class while JB comes from a family of professionals. Malcolm is a member of America’s wealthy elite, but he is so light-skinned that he finds difficulty identifying as a person of color. JB is Haitian American and proudly Black, while Willem’s ancestors were Nordic. They come from very different family backgrounds. Willem’s was the stoic, hardworking sort of immigrant family who found work and security in America, if not joy, and Willem proves himself their true heir by abandoning them for his life in New York. Malcolm’s successful and opinionated parents and older sister are stern and intimidating. JB alone truly enjoys a loving family, as his mother, aunts, and grandmother dote on him tirelessly.
The characters’ most significant differences lie in their attitudes toward their careers, attitudes that stem from their families, traumas, and artistic philosophies. JB’s aspirations are the most prolific, shown in his performance art project as a college student, his hair project as a young professional, his modus operandi at the art magazine, and his current work in portraiture, none of which have him coming off as especially likable. He exploits his race, his coworkers, his family, and his friends. JB feels entitled to use whatever material the universe hands him in whatever way best promotes his career, but he also understands that using Jude’s picture crosses a line. Malcolm’s desires, if more modest, are also more complex. Malcolm allows his family to limit his possibilities, believing their status requires him to maintain a certain place in society while also resenting that he can’t be more daring. The talent level at Ratstar is both intimidating and quotidian, preventing Malcolm from realizing his creative vision. Willem is hardworking and disciplined, and although the threat of disillusionment looms large in the other actors with whom he works at Ortolan, Willem does not succumb to it. He is simply grateful to have the opportunity to compete.
The author reveals details about the fourth and main character, Jude, through the other characters’ more fully fleshed-out lives. Jude is defined more through what he lacks than through any affirmative statement of who he is. He has no family, his race is uncertain, and he went through college without making any friends other than his three roommates. Of them, Willem is closest to Jude, and even Willem knows only that his friend suffers from disabling, incurable pain. For much of these early sections, readers know almost nothing about Jude, other than that he is poor, disabled, and extraordinarily intelligent. All of the friends turn to him for help with their calculus homework. And they delight in hearing his anecdotes about the eccentric professor who will only communicate in Greek or Latin. Jude is the only one of the four main characters not in a creative profession. He is a lawyer and is rooted in the world of logic. Yet JB finds in Jude endless artistic possibilities.
The four friends are much more focused on their careers than on romance. Of the four, Malcolm is the most forthright about his sexual failings. His lack of a sex life is high among his list of perceived failings, which he fruitlessly resolves to correct. Unfortunately, he lacks the confidence or perhaps the drive to take the initiative and brave rejection. Willem could apparently have his pick of either men or women, and he dates occasionally, but romance is not one of his primary concerns. He loves Jude, but he cannot touch him even to ease his physical pain, so physical intimacy appears unlikely. Like everything else about Jude, his sexuality is a mystery. JB is gay, and given his confidence and outgoing nature, his lack of a partner is surprising.
JB’s complex attitude toward his art is a mixture of communion, isolation, and exploitation. Traveling to his studio makes him feel he has something in common with the immigrant community that defined his parents and grandparents, as does sharing studio space with other artists. But JB’s differences are starkly highlighted. He is of the professional, not the working, class, and his artistic medium is traditional rather than avant-garde. As much as JB enjoys the community, he also likes the solitary space in which he can commune with his own thoughts, appreciating the light in both the train and the studio, and reflecting upon the ways in which he is superior to his friends. They are his subject, and although he has doubts about his work, these do not relate to using his friends. In fact, he enjoys how the pictures give him control over his subjects. Far from being missing from the photographs he has taken and the pictures he now paints, he has “a sense of ownership and contentment” in working on them, as though he were creating their individual lives. What he really loves is his investment of time and talent, both of which belong completely to him.
The four friends are well aware that they come from very different family backgrounds, and while each laments the complications of his own situation, they recognize fate’s unfairness in doling out the options as it has. JB’s draw has been the luckiest, but his position vis-à-vis relationships and a career are uncertain because his family has found such success in these respects. He has a long way to go to match, let alone surpass, them. Malcolm will never do so, and this knowledge weighs heavily on both him and his father. He is fortunate, but his great fortune renders him incapable of greatness. Malcolm cannot comprehend Willem’s decision to lose touch with his parents, and he is surprised at their lack of emotion given Willem’s great likability. But what truly astonishes all of them is Jude’s utter lack of family history. Even Jude cannot bring himself to believe that he came from nowhere, and while they sometimes see in this abyss a sort of possibility, they also recognize its attendant pain.
Jude is physically disabled, but both the nature of his injury and its cause remain mysterious, hinting at something deeply hidden within Jude that needs to be unearthed. Early on, the reader receives only hints that Jude might be unwell, mostly through Willem, who demonstrates great compassion toward his friend and an uncommon thoughtfulness. A scene from their college days shows Willem helping Jude through an episode and highlights the special nature of their friendship among the four. Jude is more open with Willem than he is with his other friends, but that openness consists only of showing his vulnerability, not of explaining it. Willem questions his own motives in not digging deeper to bring out the secrets, but Jude himself is the barrier to a deeper understanding of Jude.
