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2024 reads, #22. I’ll admit, the initial reason I picked up Andrew Boryga’s stunning debut novel, the just released Victim, was because I was so entranced by the bitter cynicism behind the book’s concept; it’s a character-heavy drama about one of those people who have been popping up in the news semi-regularly in the last decade, a person of color who gets famous by writing gritty essays about the systemic racism and oppression he’s been experiencing his whole life, but who is eventually proven to have been lying the entire time and just making up the stories he’s been presenting as “true�� to a fawning audience of guilty white liberals, his reputation destroyed while ironically accomplishing nothing except handing yet more ammunition to the far right, who use the now disgraced journalist’s fabrications as yet more evidence that “the Wokes�� are a bunch of hypocritical, lying snowflakes.

And indeed, that’s what a huge portion of this book is legitimately about, and there’s no way of getting around the fact that Boryga (a Latino academic writer, just like his fictional stand-in Javier here) means for this to be a scathing indictment of the Woke Age we currently live in, whether he’s taking down the noble yet deeply flawed middle-class people of color who embrace angry polemic politics as a means of hiding their own gentrification aspirations (as best seen here in Javier’s college girlfriend, a fiery far-left liberal with unresolved daddy issues from being raised by a cop in a pleasant suburb of Albany, but who after graduation insists on moving to a nice section of Brooklyn where they have community gardens and organic vegan restaurants, instead of Javier’s insistence on moving back to his crappy childhood neighborhood in the Bronx, insisting that she can’t be a gentrifier because “she’s not white��); the misguided white academics who mean well but ironically are the ground-level disguised racists who create these situations in the first place (such as Javier’s high-school guidance counselor, who pushes him to apply for a full-ride scholarship to a thinly disguised Oberlin University by “playing up�� his background as a fatherless Latino from the Bronx, but then bristles and literally tries to cover his tracks when Javier interprets his thoughts too literally and replies, “So I should write an essay about how I’m brown and poor, then?��); or the sociopathic marketing bros who are very happy to swoop in and skim off the top of these Woke times for easy profit, ethics be damned (such as the new young editor of a thinly disguised Village Voice, Javier’s post-college employer, who has been nationally praised for saving one of the last leftist weekly newspapers still left in the US, but has done so by basically turning the entire publication into a clickbait farm). All of those things are true about this book, and Boryga very deliberately means for these people in real life to be offended by his novel, and that’s something important for you to know before picking it up, if you happen to be one of these people yourself.

But what really blew me away here is that the book turns out to be about a lot more than this, and tells a more complicated and nuanced story than the easy headlines it’s been recently generating make it seem. First and foremost, for example, it’s ultimately the story of one particular person, the complex and multifaceted Javier at the heart of the controversy, a Puerto-Rican American who Boryga deliberately shows as coming from a long line of paternal con artists, and who is raised by his drug-dealing father (at least, before the drug-dealing father gets shot one day after an argument at a neighborhood picnic with one of his clients) to always be hustling, to always look out for himself, and to always understand that the picture you present of yourself to others will always be more important than the picture you have of yourself on the inside. That immensely helps this book from turning into a parade of cliches, because we understand that this is ultimately the story of one unique person and not just an indictment of the entire system (although it’s that as well). And more importantly, it makes it a much more engaging and entertaining read than if these had all been cartoon characters going through their 2D, cardboard-cutout motions.

And then there’s the thorny issue at the heart of these kinds of incidents, of how much of a person of color’s actions can be chalked up to the environment around them, and how much of their actions should be laid squarely at the feet of the person themselves, and the things they deliberately choose to do in life when they in fact didn’t need to do those particular things if they hadn’t wanted to. And Boryga does this in a very clever way, by simultaneously following the fate of Javier’s childhood best friend Gio, who is raised in a very similar way but with just a few changed details (both of Gio’s parents are dead instead of just his father, for example; he’s a little more embarrassed than Javier about his love for reading; he’s a little less afraid of the neighborhood gangsters, even while having the same exact ambition for money and fame that Javier does). As Gio heads to prison at the same time Javier heads to university, and then both of them reunite again in their late twenties, we can watch the complex and difficult-to-pinpoint ways their lives and attitudes both intertwine and intersect, Boryga doing so to hammer home the fact that all of us are simultaneously capable of great good and great evil all the time, and that the way we behave can’t just be broken down into simplistic statistics like education and background.

Plus there’s the fact that Boryga very purposely points out that there are very real and valid things to come out of our Woke Age too, as best seen in the way Javier legitimately now sees his old Bronx neighborhood in a different light once he graduates college and moves back, noticing for the first time how few grocery stores with decent produce there are there, how many fast-food places there are and how few healthy restaurants, how many cops there eternally are on their streets and how exactly those cops behave, versus the gingerly and always respectful actions of the police back on his university campus when dealing with the mostly upper-class, mostly lily-white populace of the school. That’s perhaps the one element here that most saves this from being a disappointing screed; for while Boryga absolutely has damning things to say about far-left liberals and the almost unsolvable mess they’ve created in the 21st century, he’s also careful to point out that there are valid reasons why it’s all become such a mess in the first place, and that there are very legitimate issues being brought up in this community that shouldn’t be ignored or shrugged away.

But what was the saving grace for me in particular -- and longtime friends will immediately understand why I loved this aspect of the book so much -- is that it’s a classic “anti-villain�� story along the lines of Breaking Bad; so in other words, if the more well-known “anti-hero�� in literature is someone who at first seems like they’re going to be the baddie, but then ends up being the protagonist of the story, an anti-villain is the exact opposite, someone who seems like a decent person at first, but whose behavior becomes more and more disgusting the further the story continues. And while I’ll let the end of this book remain spoiler-free, I can tell you that by the end of this novel, Javier’s actions are fucking reprehensible, the behavior of a person who has decided to insult and alienate every person who’s ever been important in his life, merely for his unquenchable chase for likes and retweets on social media, and the easy fame and glory that comes right after it. To me, that’s what really saves this book from being easy fodder for the alt-right; for by the end, Javier has stopped being a stand-in for his entire community and has instead become his own unique brand of monster, making it impossible to extrapolate his actions into a damnation of every far-left liberal who’s ever existed, even as Boryga has legitimately damning things to say about the “cancel culture�� that has built up around these far-left liberals over the last twenty years.

It’s a mesmerizing book, told in a mesmerizing way, and that’s why today Victim becomes my second read of 2024 to eventually show up in my annual “best books of the year�� list, coming later this December during the holidays. It will make many of my leftist friends mad, that’s undeniable; but the point Boryga so deftly makes here is that maybe you should be mad, for all of us creating a situation in the US so that there are no other choices anymore than to be either a communist or a fascist, foretelling an inevitable coming violent civil war that will be happening starting this November precisely because of it. Boryga argues here that maybe it’s time to step back and take a more complex, nuanced view of these subjects, and to stop letting our society be run through easy outrage and the cheeseburgers that are easily sold by exploiting this kneejerk anger. As a political centrist who’s been consistently told over the last twenty years that I should shut up and keep such opinions to myself, this book is a welcome breath of fresh air that particularly needs to exist in this specific time and place, and I encourage all of you to read it with this attitude in mind.