Loving Day by Mat Johnson
It’s a bad time for Warren Duffy. His comic book shop has failed. His marriage to his wife, a beautiful Welsh woman, has crashed and burned. His comic book shop in Cardiff has gone out of business. On top of that, his Irish-American father has died, and Warren is returning to America to move into his father’s half-renovated, roofless, haunted mansion in Philadelphia. At a comic-book convention there, he encounters his daughter, whose face is a perfect reflection of Warren’s white father and black mother.
This is the unlikely premise of Loving Day (Spiegel & Grau, May 2015) Mat Johnson’s moving, comic novel that examines the gulfs between races, relatives, and the living and the dead. Johnson’s deft comic hand sees Warren through encounters with ghosts and a utopian mixed-race cult in a tale that comes to a head with a riot on Loving Day, the unofficial holiday for interracial couples.
The new book by Johnson, the critically acclaimed author of Pym, Drop and Hunting in Harlem, is also receiving strong reviews. “To say that Loving Day is a book about race is like saying Moby-Dick is a book about whales,” wrote Jim Ruland in his review for the Los Angeles Times. “(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.”
And it’s probably no accident that the book was released just before its holiday namesake. Loving Day, observed on June 12, is the annual celebration of the 1967 Supreme Court decision striking down laws in 16 states that forbade people of different races from marrying. The case had been brought by Mildred and Richard Loving, a black woman and a white man, who were forbidden to marry in their home state of Virginia. They married in Washington, D.C., where interracial marriages were legal, but after returning to their home state, they were arrested for violating Virginia’s anti-miscegenation laws.
The Lovings were given a choice: serve jail terms of one to three years each, or have their sentences suspended in exchange for agreeing to leave Virginia for 25 years. They moved back to Washington, D.C. After writing Attorney General Robert F. Kennedy for relief, the Lovings’ case was referred to the American Civil Liberties Union. The ACLU helped the Lovings find lawyers who took their case through many levels of the justice system—only to be denied at every turn.
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