Ask HN: Is My Novel “Racist?”

I have written a 170,000-word campus/racetrack novel, entitled CALVIN’S GHOST, that is set in Princeton, NJ and Portland, OR between 1969 and 1992. The story concerns a young professor forced to revisit a childhood trauma. Racial themes are important in the novel, although perhaps secondary to the underlying family drama. The story concludes shortly following the LA riots in April 1992.

Recently, a junior editor at a well-regarded publisher replied to a query from my agent. He wrote, “While I appreciated the author's willingness to discuss race directly, I thought the descriptions of Black people in the first 50 pages--as violent, threatening, exotic, sexualized--contradicted the admirable aims."

Obviously, this is a terrible time to be publishing a novel, but senior editors at major publishers gave my manuscript respectful responses even while declining to move forward with it. None of them mentioned concerns voiced by this younger editor.

The 50 pages of CALVIN’S GHOST the young editor read derive from racial interactions and dynamics in the early and mid-1970s, when I was a teenager. My relationships with real people inform the scenes in these early pages. The language is realistic. They map closely to the world in which I grew up and in that sense are "true," even when specific events in the story have been embellished or invented.

The charge of racism is especially serious, particularly when one believes that our current moment of racial reckoning requires that we face our past directly, even when it makes us uncomfortable or does not comport with our sense of the world as it ought to be.

For those interested in checking out the pages of CALVIN'S GHOST that inspired this response from the young editor, you can read them using the link below. Thanks for any thoughts and feedback.

https://www.dropbox.com/s/816be1re6z8qyc7/Peter_Hammond_Schwartz.Calvins_Ghost.1-5.pdf?dl=0