Motown Man

by Bob Campbell

In Bob Campbell’s debut literary novel, we are presented with Bradley Cunningham a hard-working, dependable, loving man and capable automotive engineer. His focus, like so many of his fellow Midwestern workers and relations, has been work and helping to preserve a withering way of life in his Midwest industrial town. Bradley has done so rather than grapple with the meaning of his black identity. As if he had a choice. When Bradley meets and romances the woman of his dreams, he is drawn into a collective courage to challenge conventions of society that has used black identity to dehumanize others for their own gain. She falls for Bradley’s charms and, together, they look to build a new life in a faded factory town rife with veiled racial tension, marked uncertainty, and on the edge of losing its identity. But to his younger brother, James, their relationship is a fool’s errand. During an unseasonably cold week in November 1991, the true value of their bonds is revealed and hardened.

210 pages, Paperback

First published November 10, 2020

About the author

Bob Campbell's creative nonfiction and essays have appeared in Belt Magazine, Forge Literary Magazine, Hypertext Magazine, All Write in Sin City (podcast) and Gravel Magazine. He is a contributor to Belt Publishing’s Midwest Architecture Journeys, published in October 2019.

Bob was a staff writer for the Flint Journal, Lexington Herald-Leader and Detroit Free Press. He was also an electrician at AC Spark Plug, formerly a division of General Motors, before moving into journalism.

Motown Man is his first novel.

Reviews

[Connor Coyne]

Author Bob Campbell wants to talk about race and gender.

Specifically, he wants to talk about the fraught relationships and power imbalances between white and Black people, between men and women. So pervasive, probing, and wide-ranging are his ruminations on these topics that a reader might easily mistake many chapters for a long-form essay.

It is striking, then, that Campbell released this piece as a novel, principally taking place in a struggling auto town (hint: it's Flint, Michigan incognito) during a bitterly cold week in the 1990s. The main action follows an interracial couple, Bradley and Abby, as they sort through their hopes and doubts about their upcoming marriage during a week spent apart. Abby, a white reporter, has been sent on assignment to cover a diversity training seminar in Miami. Bradley, a Black man part of the high-caste engineering cohort of shop workers stays behind to work at the factory, visit with his brother James, and explore his old haunts about town. The tension is entirely about whether Bradley and Abby can truly communicate and understand each other, or if they are bound to fail, either by sabotaging their marriage before it starts or by sowing seeds of resentment and misunderstanding that won't bloom for years. There are other twists and turns, including several dramatic twists near the end, but the focus is kept upon the rapport between these two humans.

There were times throughout this short novel when I wish it had been more thoroughly edited. And this was particularly frustrating when a single canny observation or brilliant detail seemed buried under too many words (it is typically the responsibility of a thoughtful editor to identify these passages), but I found the commentary and story consistently provocative and nuanced, and it was buoyed by some masterful narrative choices on Campbell's part.

For example, despite the importance of connection between Bradley and Abby, they never, in the main action of the story, physically occupy the same space. The opening scenes feature a phone conversation in which Bradley confirms that Abby has safely arrived in Florida, a difficult conversation due to the defeaning roar of the factory in the background. A scene near the end features Abby's return home to an empty airport. This distance between Abby and Bradley is reinforced by the difference in weather (Miami heat vs. Michigan freeze), the mediation of phones (still firmly tethered to walls in the 1990s), and the various characters and temptations they each encounter on their own, without each other for support. But the distance is also undermined; many reveries by both characters reference their initial meeting, introductions to family, dates and memories, and these are weaved into the present action so that the flashback almost feel like they are taking place in the Now of the story. There is love and affection here. There is also misunderstanding. Abby astutely observes the contradictions and platitudes baked into the diversity seminar; she is still unable to understand Bradley's anger at a news story valorizing a Black man firing a gun at would-be robbers. Later on, the couple connects over the story (massive at the time) that Earvin "Magic" Johnson has tested positive for HIV.

These encounters merge with meditations, occasionally bordering on homilies, on the flawed and fractured elements of race relations in post-Jim Crow America, with a particular emphasis on passive-aggression and microaggressions in which whites, less able to ostracize and disenfranchise their Black colleagues and neighbors, still seek to marginalize and humiliate -- to Otherize -- them, and how the power imbalances in these relationships will forever haunt Bradley and Abby, however their marriage resolves.

There is much more I could say about Motown Man and its thematic explorations. Campbell has experience as both a journalist and as an autoworker, and he pulls deeply upon these in his nuanced examination of race and gender dynamics. In this review I have spoken exclusively about Abby and Bradley, but a large cast of characters for such a short novel, from Bradley's more militant brother James to the organizers of the Miami seminar, are quickly and deftly humanized. I am always intrigued by the question: "What does this story want me to think or feel when I have finished?" Sometimes the answer is amused, sometimes horrified, sometimes an experience of awe and wonder. I have to think that Motown Man wants its readers to think long and hard about the many questions it poses.

[Liz · Rating 4 out of 5]

Part of the allure of this novel is the setting. I live in Flint, MI and recognize many of the places Bob describes despite changing his them slightly. I believe I know some of the characters although he based them on a composite of people rather than specific individuals. James is a really well developed character and I can imagine his voice in another novel. Bradley is multi layered. He is one way at work, another with Abby, different again with his family and yet shows another persona in public. James is consistent and though troubled, more believable because of it. Abby is the least developed but then the book is Motown Man, not Motown Woman.
The technical detail does not add to the story as much as the racial/class/gender discussions which are germane to novel.
I listened to the audio version and did not like the cadence of the reader. In fact, it makes me want to read the hard copy to imagine the voices myself.

[Sherrema Oom-Dove · Rating 5 out of 5]

I greatly enjoyed the novel 'Motown Man' by Flint author Bob Campbell. Here's the link to my review of the book on Amazon.

https://www.amazon.com/gp/customer-re...