Victimhood is a complex subject, one with the capacity to instill empathy and create connection to the misfortunes of others, though sometimes accompanied by the stigma of helplessness. As Andrew Boryga’s novel Victim shows, it is a liability that can damage a life but can also be reclaimed as an asset to be unjustly exploited.
Victim is the story of Javier Perez, a young Puerto Rican man and aspiring writer from an unnamed rough-and-tumble neighborhood in the Bronx. At the beginning of the novel, we see twelve-year-old Javi on a visit to Puerto Rico, watching his drug dealer father making his rounds, hustling and shaking down customers for money. Javi witnesses his father gunned down at a neighborhood block party, then returns to the Bronx and lives with his cash-strapped, industrious mother, who urges him to become an engineer and make something of his life. Several years later, Javi’s best friend, Giovanni, drops out of school and ends up in prison after the gang he joined gets busted. At the urging of a school counselor, Javi writes a moving but largely embellished essay about his hardships growing up and losing his childhood friend to “the system,” winning a scholarship to a prestigious university. There, he meets Anais Delgado, a half-Latina, half-white student who raises his consciousness and encourages him to write the truth about the injustices inflicted upon people of color. Javi discovers a marketplace for personal stories about police harassment, displacement, and gang indoctrination, all experiences that often happen to people like Javi. Just not to him, specifically.
Victim highlights the hazards and moral dilemma of telling a truth that is not your own. Javi rationalizes his stories because he gives others a voice (“I haven’t lived them, but I understand them”) but he does it for all the wrong reasons. He learns victimhood sells. School counselors know it helps universities improve their enrollment statistics. Editors love Javi’s stories because, behind their professed commitment to diversity and justice, they know it’s profitable. Readers want to read the work of writers like Javi because it relieves their guilt. Javi knows these stories will help him become a respected writer, and his entitlement to recognition turns into an entitlement to stretch the truth. He goes from writing things that have happened to others to events that could have happened to what has never happened. He no longer writes for others but for himself. Those “others” seem, at best, indifferent to his efforts and, at times, skeptical of Javi’s authenticity.
Boryga’s character development is exceptional. He draws the reader into Javi’s psyche, experiencing his constant rationalizations, the fear of being caught, and the occasional pangs of guilt. The supporting characters are complex and nuanced. Anais, who pushes Javi to advocate for brown people, can’t seem to part with the accouterments of suburban privileges when she and Javi move into an apartment in the Bronx after graduation. Giovanni, who once fancied himself a “player” and found education useless, hides a secret love of books and develops an insightful eye for his friend’s bullshit. Sonia, Javi’s mother, is, in one moment, an overprotective parent, fearful of Javier meeting the same fate as his father, and in the next, a pragmatist, immensely proud of her heritage yet refusing to be shamed by Javi when he calls her out for pursuing a romantic relationship with a white doctor. Rachel, an ambitious editor of a trendy online magazine, is deftly presented as both Javi’s strongest ally and his clever, watchful antagonist.
Particularly noteworthy is the way in which Boryga shows Javi creating his stories between the gaps of his experience, connecting what someone said or did to what they ought to have said or done, each time perfecting his craft and taking more risks. In one of his early stories, he connects a single, unexpected stop by the campus police during his first year of college to the “countless times” he has been stopped by the police in the Bronx, where “the killing of Black and brown youth by cops is as common as breathing.” The cop who returns his student ID and advises him of a safer, well-lit shortcut to his dorm becomes the officer who “chose to spare my life.” Years later, when Javi announces his intention to leave his teaching job to write full-time, one of his students congratulates him on making more money. “Now you really have no excuse not to buy some fly kicks and throw out those dusty rags on your feet.” In his writing, Javi, lamenting how he abandoned his students, translates the young man’s remark into, “I’ll miss having someone who looks like me up there at the front of the room.” To land a front-page article for a magazine, he fabricates an account of Giovanni’s life after prison, parlaying his friend’s discovery of his love of books into a savior story. “It wasn’t long before he had questions of his own. Questions I couldn’t answer. Questions that required him to check books out from the library, watch YouTube videos, and read articles. And it wasn’t long that after that I watched G start to unscrew the training wheels and take charge of his own reeducation.”
The tension of the story is thick. We are waiting for Javi to be caught, publicly disgraced, and brought down, while questioning not whether his tactics are wrong, but how wrong? Aren’t those who push him to write “juicier race/social justice” stories as responsible as Javi himself for the pariah he comes? Is their ability to walk away after Javi’s seemingly inevitable downfall really a sign of the very privilege they are trying to absolve themselves of? Are they, being duped by Javi’s stretches of truth and outright fabrications, claiming themselves to be “victims,” guilty of the very sin they condemn him for?
Readers may liken Victim to Percival Everett’s Erasure, a novel about a college professor who gives in to market demand for gritty but inauthentic stories of Black lives, the basis for the award-winning film American Fiction. But Boryga’s story focuses less on satire and more on Javi’s coming of age. Javi is a young man nudged in the wrong direction, and much of the power of Victim is about his immaturity, about wanting success and fame, and of not yet being conscious of the moral consequences of poor choices young men often make. His bad decisions are no worse than his friend, Giovanni’s, yet with vastly different consequences.
Victim is a compelling work with a flawed protagonist, a realistic storyline, and strong dramatic tension. Victim raises important questions about the choices we make and the price we pay for success. It shows us how we are all a combination of our authentic selves, the misimpressions of others, and, sometimes, the occasional fabrications we invent for the sake of being valued.
Victim
Andrew Boryga
Doubleday Books
Published March 12, 2024
Southern Review of Books 