The letter form does something the argument around this book in 2015 never let it do. Read it as a letter.

The problem with this book is what happened to it in its first fortnight. The Morrison blurb landed, the word "required" got welded to the cover, and within a month it had stopped being a letter from a father to a son and become a Position that people were expected to hold. I would bet money that most of those arguing about it that summer had read the opening and skipped to the end.

Read as the thing it is, a letter written to a fifteen-year-old in the immediate aftermath of a particular news cycle, it's stranger and much better. It isn't trying to persuade you of anything. You are reading someone else's post. That's why the repetition works: the body, the body, the body — until the word stops behaving like a metaphor and becomes a thing that can be broken on a street you could name.

The Howard chapters are the best writing in it. The Mecca, the yard, a young man's sudden sense of how much Black life actually contains, and none of it nostalgic. The Prince Jones material is unbearable in the right way, especially the visit to his mother, where Coates does the hard thing and lets her be more composed than he is.

Where I part company: the Dreamers. As a device it's effective for thirty pages and then it starts doing the work an argument should be doing. Whenever the book needs to close a gap the Dreamers arrive, always the same shape, lawns and pie and a fog of not knowing, and the writing flattens out at exactly the point where the rest of this book is precise. Femi has made the counter-argument to me three separate times: the flatness is deliberate, because that is what the Dream looks like from underneath. Fine. I still think a book this specific about one dead friend owed specificity to the people on the other side of the street.

The Paris section splits readers. I like it, mostly, because it's the only place he is permitted to be delighted, and the delight is complicated by knowing exactly what it costs to be delighted anywhere else.

About "required reading". I hate the phrase and I hate what it did here. Required by whom, and for whose benefit? Requirement is how you kill a text; ask anyone who was marched through Of Mice and Men at fourteen. This one survives it better than most because it's short and because the voice sits close to your ear, but you can watch it turning into a syllabus in real time.

Eight. Read it in one evening with your phone in another room. It was built to be received that way. It does not survive being read in eleven-minute pieces on a commute, which I tried first, and I got almost nothing out of it.