What do you think?
Rate this book
Nate
Nathan James Morris: a talented, ambitious black kid from P.G. County, Maryland. He wants to be an illustrator. But at 19, he has been expelled from Freedom College for alleged misconduct. He has few friends, aside from the parasitic Guy Sellers; and save for his scholarship's chump change, even fewer dollars. Hurt, angry, and in desperate need of cash, he joins the Marines. "The road to manhood is paved with tanks and convoys!" he loudly boasts. But he soon discovers that his own “road” has been paved with far more unpleasant things: whimsical officers, endless bomb attacks, disease, an unbelievable desolation. After the military, his “road” gets rockier....an unhappy reuniting with family, friends and fiancee....a kidnaping in Turkey ....violent confrontations with neo-Nazis and racist North Africans....his studies and miseries at C.S.U., America’s most prestigious black university, and his final days in a DC slum, as witness to (and participant in) the wild destruction of his older brother’s marriage, with a little help from the one “friend” who never seems to leave him be: Guy Sellers. At turns eloquent, elegant, explosive, raw, obscene, shockingly brutal and wildly funny, NATE is a brilliant meditation on what it means to be young, black and male in today’s world.
- GenresFiction
339 pages, Kindle Edition
First published January 1, 2006
2 people are currently reading
83 people want to read
Ratings & Reviews
Friends & Following
Create a free account to discover what your friends think of this book!
Community Reviews
Displaying 1 - 4 of 4 reviews
January 28, 2021
amerika now has its own Celine.
March 9, 2020
A goddamn powerhouse.
Easily one of the most accomplished contemporary novels I've ever read.
The fact that this book is languishing in almost total obscurity is the greatest literary shame of the past 30 years.
Tell everyone you know to read this.
Easily one of the most accomplished contemporary novels I've ever read.
The fact that this book is languishing in almost total obscurity is the greatest literary shame of the past 30 years.
Tell everyone you know to read this.
July 25, 2015
fucking amazing.
June 20, 2023
There are miserable, misanthropic, relentlessly mean and fucked up books, and then there's "Nate" by P. Lewis. Celine comparisons are apt, but seriously-- this one makes "Journey to the End of Night" look like the fucking Boxcar Children. There's no reason for a novel this powerful and unique to be practically unknown, except for the fact that American readers typically expect things like "hope" or "uplift" in their narratives; if ever it feels like "hope" is coming on in "Nate," rest assured it will be quickly followed by the main character getting the ever-loving shit kicked out of him by some white supremacist lunatic.
I'll say this: unlike with "Journey to the End of the Night," I really enjoyed reading this one, to the extent one can "enjoy" a book that's so dead-set on showing you the absolute worst parts of human existence. It's almost always operating at maximum energy-- as in, every other scene involves characters screaming profanities at each other in all caps (in a book that's full of sudden violence, shocking racism and homophobia and sexism, and, err, creative uses of human waste, you should consider these scenes "breathers")-- but it doesn't wear the reader out like Celine does. I think part of that has to do with just how pointed Nate's/P. Lewis's rage is, and just how hilariously he expresses it. But another part of it might have to do with the bonkers plot, which only gets more messed up once our hero returns from war and tries to enroll in college. It ends up being kind of like "Invisible Man" if that book's narrator was, instead of being completely alive to possibility, completely dead to it, and instead of galvanizing the people around him with the powers of his speech, only ever pissing everybody off.
I feel like I would've had much sounder opinions about America, etc in my young adulthood if I had read "Nate" earlier in life. But this country is not about to canonize a book that is so intently against every idea this country has about itself, to say nothing of just about every person living in it. Eh. Oh well. Guess it will be on us, the tiny community of people who have read "Nate," to slap copies of "American Dirt" out of people's hands and give em this little bundle of purifying hate instead.
I'll say this: unlike with "Journey to the End of the Night," I really enjoyed reading this one, to the extent one can "enjoy" a book that's so dead-set on showing you the absolute worst parts of human existence. It's almost always operating at maximum energy-- as in, every other scene involves characters screaming profanities at each other in all caps (in a book that's full of sudden violence, shocking racism and homophobia and sexism, and, err, creative uses of human waste, you should consider these scenes "breathers")-- but it doesn't wear the reader out like Celine does. I think part of that has to do with just how pointed Nate's/P. Lewis's rage is, and just how hilariously he expresses it. But another part of it might have to do with the bonkers plot, which only gets more messed up once our hero returns from war and tries to enroll in college. It ends up being kind of like "Invisible Man" if that book's narrator was, instead of being completely alive to possibility, completely dead to it, and instead of galvanizing the people around him with the powers of his speech, only ever pissing everybody off.
I feel like I would've had much sounder opinions about America, etc in my young adulthood if I had read "Nate" earlier in life. But this country is not about to canonize a book that is so intently against every idea this country has about itself, to say nothing of just about every person living in it. Eh. Oh well. Guess it will be on us, the tiny community of people who have read "Nate," to slap copies of "American Dirt" out of people's hands and give em this little bundle of purifying hate instead.
Displaying 1 - 4 of 4 reviews