Victim

January 29, 2024
Part blistering satire, part earnest bildungsroman, Boryga’s canny debut follows an aspiring Puerto Rican writer from the Bronx. While Javi focuses on high school, his best friend Gio joins a gang and is sent to prison on a drug trafficking conviction. Javi’s guidance counselor encourages him, with exploitative zeal, to “look for pity” from college admissions boards by writing an essay about his identity and his father’s murder when he was young. After he’s accepted by a prestigious university in Upstate New York, Javi learns he can leverage the roll of victim to stand out from his peers. Thinking of himself as a hustler like his drug dealer father, he writes essays for the school paper in which he capitalizes on outrage over social justice issues by embellishing his experiences (one such article presents a benign encounter with a campus police officer as an abusive instance of racial profiling). After graduation, Javi pursues a freelance writing career, and a similarly disingenuous piece ends up going viral. It’s only when he reunites with a recently released Gio, who suggests his work doesn’t ring true, that Javi begins to look in the mirror. Throughout, Boryga plays his dynamic central duo against each other to striking effect. This foray into the uses and misuses of victimhood bears fruit. Agent: Danielle Bukowski, Sterling Lord Literistic.

February 1, 2024
In the vein of satires such as Percival Everett's glorious Erasure (2001, adapted into the film American Fiction), Paul Beatty's The Sellout (2016), and Mithu Sanyal's Identitti (2022), Boryga's debut novel is told by Javier Perez as he looks back on his life, speaking to a mysterious audience who knows how this all will end. Javier, of Puerto Rican heritage and from the Bronx, witnesses shocking violence when he's around his drug-dealer father. In contrast, with his hard-working mother's support, he does well at school. Javier longs for literary fame and learns to hustle his identity, developing a persona that conforms to stereotypes about people of color. His conceits bring him success--a scholarship to an elite college, a writing gig at a prestigious magazine, and a fawning Twitter following. Javier's lies may be objectionable, but the people who swallow them or shape them to fit click-worthy headlines are perhaps even more loathsome. Superbly written, this is a darkly funny, searing expos� of the contemporary appetite for trauma narratives and the ill-informed responses of many institutions to issues of racial justice.

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Starred review from January 15, 2024
Recognizing what a "powerful grift" playing the victim can be, young Nuyorican Javier Perez becomes an in-demand writer, but with troubling consequences. When he was 12, Javi watched his estranged father, a drug dealer, get shot to death in Puerto Rico. Back home in the Bronx, the boy was no longer your average poor kid, but "one of those tragic kids" who got special treatment at school. Coached by a guidance counselor on how to get a free ride at a diversity-prioritizing upstate college desperate for students like him, he fudges details about his life in his admissions essay. As a columnist for the school paper and then as a "new" voice for The Rag, a long-standing New York publication of note, Javi masters the art of taking "artistic liberties" in telling stories about racism, police harassment, poverty, and other subjects that "touch on the pulse of our culture." He is only momentarily shaken after his girlfriend dumps him for his outlandish dishonesty, convincing himself he's getting at the "core truth" of his subjects. They include his far more authentic, long-lost friend Gio, who spent 10 years in prison for dealing. All this has the makings of a timely novel, but in his first work of fiction, Boryga is relentlessly superficial in his depiction of Javi, whose supposed talent is never on display (excerpts from his essays are unimpressive). Lacking in convincing moments--Javi's inevitable comeuppance is dropped late like a cement shoe--the novel has both an unreliable narrator and an unreliable author. A buzzworthy topic given a shallow treatment.

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