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The Son of Mr.
Suleman
by Eric Jerome Dickey
c.2021, Dutton
$27.00 / $36.00 Canada
560 pages
By Terri Schlichenmeyer
The Truth Contributor
The sins of the father shall be visited upon the son.
That's what's said, that a son pay for his father's
misdeeds, but maybe the old man didn't intend to leave a
negative legacy. Maybe he tried his best, but something went
wrong. Maybe, as in the new novel The Son of Mr.
Suleman by Eric Jerome Dickey, Pops meant well.
Adjunct Professor Pi Suleman didn't want to be at his
employer's event. He had better things to do, better places
to be than a room at UAN, but his boss, the white woman who
hired him, the wife of a powerful judge, demanded that he be
there or else.
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Like a fool, he'd taken gifts from her, things given in what
he understood was an effort to make his job easier. She was
helpful to him but it came with a price: whenever she wanted
to sexually assault him, she did, and when she threatened to
say that he was to blame, there was little a Black Man from
Memphis could do.
Meeting Gemma Buckingham was the only good thing to happen
at that UAN event.
She was one of the most beautiful women Pi had ever seen,
this child of London and Africa, and he wanted to know her
better. Even when she mentioned that she was a fan of his
father, a man who impregnated Pi's mother and then
disappeared, a famous man, a writer Pi had never met but
hated, Pi still wanted to know Gemma Buckingham.
She was coy with him, teasing him with information and
curves. She was apparently well off and she didn't care that
Pi wasn't yet tenured, didn't have the salary he needed,
drove an old car. Yes, she had secrets – but then, so did he
and the White one who was blowing up his phone with demands
and traps and tricks was the secret who was going to pay...
There is an old rule for writers that says, "kill your
darlings," meaning that a good writer should eliminate
unneeded passages and overused phrases. If you've ever read
anything by the late author Eric Jerome Dickey, you know
that he generally ignored that advice; The Son of Mr.
Suleman, filled as this brick-sized novel is with
"darlings," is no exception.
And yet, it's hard to even slightly dislike a story
that makes its characters tackle DWB, racism, classism,
white supremacy, ill-placed power, and a dozen other
societal issues between bodice-ripping erotica and
page-ripping thrills. It's hard to let go of a book that
makes you absolutely, 100 percent need to know what
happens next. The surprise is that Dickey does all this as
he pushes readers to accept a degree of discomfort: unlike
with his past novels, the sex isn't always sexy here, and
the thrills are more threatening than thrilling.
Be prepared to be turned every which way with this book. Be
set to let The Son of Mr. Suleman eat up your
weekend. Just be ready, because missing it would be a sin.
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