cover image THE FIRST THING SMOKING

THE FIRST THING SMOKING

Nelson Eubanks, . . Ballantine/One World, $19.95 (210pp) ISBN 978-0-345-45178-1

Identity is forged in shades of brown in this expressive debut collection of 17 linked short stories. Maceo Watson grows up in New York City and the Jersey suburbs. His father looks "mostly white" and his mother is "the color of coffee with lots of milk in it." Maceo himself is darker than either of his parents, which causes his great-aunt Inola (of "car-tire-black-colored skin") to lament his fate and urge him to stay out of the sun. Shuttling between his mixed-race neighborhood and white-kid private school, Maceo tries to fit in both places. Eubanks records Maceo's passage from street games to Ivy League schooling in stories and shorter prose-poem pieces, shifting back and forth from jazzy, streetwise action to impressionistic observation. The fear and exhilaration of fighting is conveyed in the title story, in which Maceo strikes back against brutal great-aunt Inola and then trounces his bullying cousin, Big Head Dwight. The brief vignettes, many of them set in Brazil, are less effective than the longer narrative pieces. A bloody confrontation in a bar in "Novo Tiempo" passes by too quickly; a portrait of a not-quite-there-yet drag queen in "Impromptu Parade" is funny but superficial. "A Lie in Seven Parts," perhaps the book's most accomplished piece, walks a thematic tightrope as it tells of Maceo's wanderings through Bahia, Brazil, with a dark-skinned German sexpot and an embarrassingly blond German man; it manages to balance racial discomfort, sexual competition and the decadence of tourism, coming to a sordid and surprising conclusion. Eubanks's grappling with race is refreshingly nuanced, though his lyrical stylings are more conventional. (Aug.)