Black Cake

When Lin, Covey’s beleaguered father, drowning in gambling debt to the island’s notorious loan shark, admits he may be in over his head, he introduces a dynamic critical to the novel. Life is not easy. The novel has a wide reach of storylines, and every character introduced into the novel in turn introduces their backstory. These stories-within-stories reflect the novel’s perception of life itself as full of unexpected twists and agonizing turns, full of risks and threats, really at the whim of chance, and how a person must learn to navigate through such a challenging and treacherous environment to experience the fullest joys of life. You cannot run from life; you cannot hide from life. The story of Coventina Lyncook that begins to unfold here will become a powerful tool of instruction—a mother, even after her death, attending to the responsibilities of motherhood, teaching her grown children how to live. I see what you have become, Eleanor says in all but words; let me show you why, now at midlife, it is never too late to learn.

In a novel that uses the dynamic of riding the nasty, unpredictable waves of the open ocean as a metaphor for how to deal with the unexpected turns in life, these opening chapters juxtapose a variety of dead-end strategies for avoiding rather than engaging in life. There is Eleanor Bennett, who is introduced into the novel as the conventional central character—her death at a grand old age brings together her family for a traditional funeral service. However, like her grown children as they listen to her recording, the reader very quickly learns that this central character is a construct, a lie, a fiction—that she has harbored some sort of dark secret for most of her life, most notably a child neither of her kids knew about. Here, the novel offers one strategy for handling the complexities of life’s journey: Hide from them, pretend they never happened, create a safe and stable persona, and try very hard to make that persona realistic enough. It is only with the fast approach of death that Eleanor sits down to try to undo the damage of her strategy of retreat: “I know,” she says on the recording, “I need to explain why you never knew any of this. But it won’t make any sense if I don’t start at the beginning” (34).

And so the novel sets out to rationalize the strategy of retreat. Despite her heroic feats in the open ocean, testing herself to push herself farther out each day, she fails to apply that courage, determination, and resolve in her life. In this the novel asks a difficult question: Is Covey’s decision to open up at last to her children only after her death a singular act of never-too-late heroism or a particularly painful example of her cowardice?

Her two grown children, as they gather for her funeral, evidence their mother’s evasion of life’s often perilous challenges. In Byron, the novel offers an example of the determination to bend circumstances to a singular purpose. Byron never deviated from his life plan: Despite being exposed to racism at virtually every turn of his education (a Black oceanographer in a field dominated by whites), Byron completed his education ambitions; he has found celebrity as a charismatic advocate for ocean protection; he has worked his way up through the network of promotions at his institute. He influences, he directs, he calls the shots. Along the way, however, to follow this life plan, Byron has shut himself off from the complications and the messes of others. We only get hints of the collapsed relationship with Lynette here, but in separating himself from life, Byron applies the lessons of his own professional dreams—he wants to use robots to actually map the bottom of the oceans—to his emotional and psychological life. Plan it. Map it. Understand it through a careful manipulation of observation and expectation. His careful, insulated sense of himself—Lynette told him as she moved out that “he was full of himself” (30)—now positions him as he meets his failure of a sister to be smug and judgmental. He has much to learn.

Benny, meanwhile, takes her mother’s sense of retreating from reality and simply immerses herself in it, going to the extreme opposite of her controlling brother. To borrow from the novel’s master metaphor of the open ocean, she jumps in the water with only a sense of how to swim. Not surprisingly, approaching 40, her life is a series of chance encounters, hasty decisions, and regrettable choices. She does not fit in because she does not want to fit in. She is biracial, she is bisexual, and she embraces a life philosophy without consequences. She is pure action, pursuing a peripatetic lifestyle, “working precarious jobs” (22), pausing at odd intervals to test a foredoomed relationship, all in a consequence-free environment. If her brother dreams of mapping the ocean, Benny sees no problem with dogpaddling in its immensity, allowing herself the illusion of design and purpose. She resists commitment, denies accountability, and finds heroic the comfort that she has stayed clear of either, seeing both as elaborate traps. Like her brother, she has much to learn from her mother.