Keeper Awards: Marlon James
Marlon James James made the transition from taglines to plotlines look easy.
Image credit: Marshall Franklin Long
At first glance, this year’s Keepers are a ragtag bunch. Their mediums run the gamut from good old-fashioned pen and paper to the human body; their habitats are classrooms, venerable theater stages and rock clubs. But here’s where this diverse group converges: Each Keeper has talent to spare, and is an indispensible cog in the wheel of Twin Cities culture. For that, we hereby present them with fancy words, pretty pictures -- and an illustration by fellow keeper Robert Algeo -- in an attempt to flatter them into never leaving town.
Marlon James had the blues. The year was 2000, and the 28-year-old was running an ad agency in Kingston, Jamaica, not far from his childhood home of Portmore. “Is this it?” he said to a friend one day. “Is this as good as it gets—me waking up and writing things like, ‘WE’RE GOOD AT MAKING YOU BETTER!’ for the rest of my life?”
As it turns out, this was very much not it for James, whose quarter-life crisis stoked a love for storytelling that began when he was a young bookworm gobbling up works by Henry Fielding, Márquez and Dashiell Hammett. Five years and two unpublished starter novels later, James released his first book, John Crow’s Devil, an allegorical fever-dream about good and evil set in a small Jamaican village. Next came an MFA from Wilkes University in Pennsylvania, a teaching job at Macalester College in St. Paul and The Book of Night Women, his acclaimed slave narrative.
Like his hero Salman Rushdie, another ad-man turned novelist, James made the transition from taglines to plotlines look easy. It helps that he has an ear for vernacular dialogue and an eye on smashing stereotypes with dark, devastating prose. “I’m not the most acceptable figure in Jamaica,” says James, now 40, in a thick Caribbean brogue. We’re sitting in the writer’s airy Minneapolis apartment amongst poster art, books and vinyl LPs. And rugs. You’ve never seen so many rugs in a one-bedroom flat. “The old literary guard there believes novels should be ads for our country—should include the nice beaches and talk about the beautiful people and have somebody say, ‘No problem, mon!’ I won’t do that. I don’t think books should have morals.”
But James is no bitter expat. He’s simply interested in “human muck”—in bad choices and how the consequences to those choices shape people and their surroundings. His next novel will be published by Oneworld in 2013 and delves into the attempted assassination of Bob Marley in December 1976, a particularly volatile period for Jamaican politics. James describes A Brief History of Seven Killings as an “experimental thriller, the loosest thing I’ve ever written.” (He’s currently on hiatus from Macalester to “complete the damn thing.” “I’m a huge procrastinator,” he says. “I love my adopted city—so many great distractions.”)
While the author is understandably tight-lipped about the unfinished book, it’s safe to say it will contain zero flowery descriptions of Jamaican beaches.
Illustration by Robert Algeo. Download a high-res version here.
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