The Unsettled: A Novel by Ayana Mathis

This novel gut-punched me in ways that only good novels can. I could feel tears sting along those nerves behind my eyes. Sometimes I felt my skin get sweat-clammy. The Unsettled unsettles, just like Mathis wants it to.

Right from the start, The Unsettled knocks you down and it doesn’t let up. Its breathless, relentless struggle, the way it forces the reader to keep grasping for relief mimics the feeling that its protagonists feel, trapped in a transient limbo of poverty and abuse and disappointment. This is a novel about what it is to be black and working class in urban America.

The novel revolves around a young boy and his mother, forced to live in temporary housing because of an abusive stepfather and husband, because of racist, classist inequities, because life has dealt them a harsh hand. The novel documents their life before and during their stay in this housing, the people they encounter there, at school, in their former and current neighborhoods. Interwoven between these grim chapters is the story of the mother’s past, her mother and a different world of an all-black enclave in the deep south. In this place too, there is the struggle for blackness to simply exist. The two stories are linked by several threads, the most salient of which is the structural oppression of blackness in America; both stories eventually merge into one, culminating in an explosive end.

Mathis writes with a machete, its edge as sharp as a scalpel. The prose in The Unsettled is blunt, straightforward, and will absolutely cut you down. But the pace of this beating does not exhaust; I was compelled to return to the book again and again until it was done with me (and not I done with it). Its characters were there with me, around me, so fleshy and tangible. I read mostly in bed, where I feel warm and safe, and there were more than a few times when I put down the book and nearly cried, wishing they did not have to live in such an unsafe, cold, grey place.