As a fellow novelist, I do not envy Nathan Harris the task of coming up with a chaser to his 2021 debut, The Sweetness of Water. Booker-longlisted, a New York Times bestseller and Oprah’s Book Club pick, it even appeared on that list of stuff Barack Obama likes that I’ve always assumed some poor zoomer intern is tasked with making up at the end of every year (I’m maybe being cynical here – there is a non-zero chance that Obama really did spend 2022 blasting Ethel Cain. In which case, my apologies – and, samesies, Mr President!).
If Harris did feel sophomore jitters, then Amity, his 2025 follow-up, certainly doesn’t show them. This is a smart, sensitive and very assured novel, albeit one that doesn’t stray radically from the winning formula of its predecessor. Once again, Harris takes the Reconstruction-era deep south as his setting, and African American characters, recently – and tenuously – liberated from slavery are the driving force of his narrative.
Cut to 1860s New Orleans, where Coleman, a freed man in the wake of the Confederacy’s dissolution, still works as a household servant to the Harper family, to whom he and his beloved elder sister June were given as a wedding gift when they were only children. The paterfamilias, Mr Wyatt Harper, aggrieved by his perceived loss of social privilege in postwar Louisiana, joins an expedition to Mexico in search of wealth and adventure that might soothe his bruised ego. Coleman and June are tragically separated by his acquisitive ambitions: the infatuated Mr Harper takes June westward, while Coleman is forced to remain behind with the hypochondriac Mrs Harper and her belligerent daughter Florence.
The novel opens in 1866, when Mr Harper, after several years’ absence, has at last sent for the rest of his family to join him. The Harper women, thoroughly in denial of the realities of frontier life, buy passage aboard a steamship and begin to toss their ballgowns into trunks. Coleman must screw his courage to the sticking place and accompany them if he is ever to be reunited with his sister, the “only individual” who has ever treated him “like a real person”.
The novel unfolds in chapters alternating between the perspectives of Coleman and June. While June’s life in Mexico is told in the third person, Coleman’s chapters are presented as a retrospective first-person account. The choice makes sense by the novel’s close – and the sweet, fastidious Coleman is an engaging storyteller, whose voice Harris is able to seamlessly maintain. A garrulous autodidact, Coleman knows he is “not just learned but intelligent” in comparison to most; the Harpers, meanwhile, view him with a melange of snobbish affection and disdain, “a house-servant of so delicate a make-up that he could hardly do more than serve champagne”. The journey westward – which, of course, goes metaphorically south – is a voyage of self-discovery for Coleman, who despite his intellectual brilliance must assume some of his sister’s instinctual courage if he is ever to regain her love.
Harris’s perceptive writing of the fraught relationships between Amity’s central characters is outstanding, and shows a deep consideration of the more subtle ways that white supremacy undergirds “civilised” middle-class society in the American south. Wyatt still treats June with the utter entitlement of the slave owner, and Harris conveys her emotional exhaustion as vividly as her physical: “Her place was to assure [Wyatt] that he was on the right side of every transaction, every argument, every encounter in the short history that was his unremarkable life.” Elsewhere, Coleman’s relationship with Florence Harper – a spoiled and careless young woman, but in possession of a “strange, unsettling resolve” – is also beautifully done. Unwilling companions on a journey across perilous country, their repartee, in which every verbal jab is freighted with a complex history of mutual resentment and dependence, is a joy to read.
There are some aspects of the novel that didn’t work for me. Coleman’s slightly pompous, ornamental voice is not a natural fit for the action set pieces, which occur more frequently as the narrative progresses, and tend to slump away into lethargy. The inner lives of the novel’s core characters are also so richly rendered that the wider cast end up weirdly undertuned by comparison. The primary antagonists seem especially thin and tacked on, a pale reach for a peril never really felt.
Harris’s novel is being marketed as a western, but I think the “wanted” poster fonts and bleachy sunsets of the cover might be mis-selling it slightly. It wears a Stetson and spurs self-consciously, at best. At its core, Amity is a warm-hearted and worthy contribution to the American literature of emancipation.
Amity by Nathan Harris is published by Tinder (£20). To support the Guardian order your copy at guardianbookshop.com. Delivery charges may apply.