Review: The devastating tragedy driving what might be Marlon James most talked-about novel

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Set us as preferred Book ReviewThe Disappearers By Marlon James Riverhead Books: 640 pages, $32If you buy books linked on our site, The Times may earn a commission from Bookshop.org, whose fees support independent bookstores.“You do realize that there is a Jamaica underneath this Jamaica, right?” says a man named Jordan early in Marlon James’ virtuosic novel, “The Disappearers.” He means that there’s a living, breathing gay subculture in the country.So the young man he’s schooling, Eddy, doesn’t have to sublimate his lust through Prince albums and men’s swimwear catalogs.But in the summer of 1988, the central moment of the novel’s plot, there are layers upon layers to that gay community, and its enemies.

There’s a semi-out culture in which Jordan and Eddy are rehearsing for a performance of John Herbert’s 1967 gay prison play, “Fortune and Men’s Eyes.” There’s the proscriptive Christian culture; there’s a drag and gay dance-club underground engineered to sidestep it.There’s the flagrantly homophobic reggae star Streggeh Don, who berates the nation’s gay “battymen,” and a gay aristocratic class, in which a wealthy ambassador can stockpile gay porn (and gay men) with impunity.But most important of all, there’s the violence: “The Disappearers” turns on an incident in which most of the play’s actors are assaulted by a mob (“ten phone calls to ten men with ten clubs”).

They kill one and hospitalize the others, some brutally.(One man has his eyes gouged out.) Jordan, who escapes relatively unscathed, is at once cowed and traumatized yet committed to vengeance.

Eddy, who missed the incident, is stalked by survivor’s guilt.It is one moment, but James applies every tool he has as a super maximalist to it.His breakthrough novel, 2009’s “The Book of Night Women,” was a mult...