Praise for Loving Day
“Incisive . . . razor-sharp . . . Loving Day is that rare mélange: cerebral comedy with pathos. The vitality of our narrator deserves much of the credit for that. “He has the neurotic bawdiness of Philip Roth’s Alexander Portnoy; the keen, caustic eye of Bob Jones in Chester Himes’s If He Hollers Let Him Go; the existential insight of Ellison’s Invisible Man.””
“Exceptional . . . To say that Loving Day is a book about race is like saying Moby-Dick is a book about whales. . . . [Mat Johnson’s] unrelenting examination of blackness, whiteness and everything in between is handled with ruthless candor and riotous humor. . . . Even when the novel’s family strife and racial politics are at peak intensity, Johnson’s comic timing is impeccable. . . . While it’s tempting to call Johnson’s novel timely or even prescient, he clearly longs for a time when it can be called historical. Sadly, we’re not even close. Until we are able to have the kind of frank and open conversations about race that are commonplace in Loving Day but rare in the real world, the myth of a post-racial society will remain a comic book fantasy.”
“Hilarious and touching new novel about family, identity and what it means to truly love other people . . . Johnson is one of the funniest writers in America. . . . [He] gets at the heart of what it means to be a person—and he does so with more skill, generosity and, yes, love, than just about anyone else writing fiction today. ‘Forgiveness comes later in life, after you’ve created enough disasters of your own,’ Warren observes toward the end of the novel. The disasters make us who we are, and the results can sometimes be amazing—as amazing as this beautiful, triumphant miracle of a book.”