Photograph by Shef Reynolds, courtesy of Agate Publishing
Early on in Jabari Asim’s new novel, Only the Strong, Lorenzo “Guts” Tolliver, retired “professional leg-breaker,” relaxes in his office. (He’s now the owner of a taxi fleet, courtesy of his former employer, Ananias Goode, who’s trying to go legit, too—but that’s another story.) Tolliver’s interrupted by Playfair, a guy known for a magical car trunk that yields up exotic fish and birds, baseball cards, and even leather jackets big enough to fit Guts (who wears size 11 EEE shoes). Playfair plops some cutting-edge technology on Guts’ desk: a portable 8-track player, complete with an AM radio. He presses play and the strains of Jerry Butler’s “Only the Strong Survive,” fill the office. Tolliver asked for W.C. Handy, but hey—the Iceman will do.
Gateway City, of course, is a lot like St. Louis—you can spot landmarks here and there, including Kirkwood Cleaners, Katz Drugstore, the racetrack, and Fairgrounds Park. But it’s also imaginary, filled with literal ghosts and made-up places that may or may not have an analog in the real world. Asim, you may remember, was once St. Louis Post-Dispatch books editor; he’s now living in Boston with his family and teaching at Emerson College. Though he’s been gone for 20 years, he says it wasn’t hard to conjure up the community he grew up in. “They say when you get older you tend to remember things that happened a long time ago, and forget where you put your car keys,” he says. “And I’ve found that to be true in some ways—it’s easier to go back and say, ‘OK, now what was on that corner?’” (His family still lives in St. Louis, so he could make a fact-check call if needed—though he says the need was rare.)
Plus, his vivid characters told him pretty much everything he needed to know—sometimes forcefully. “Goode kept rudely inserting himself into the conversation,” Asim chuckles, “saying, ‘I need to be a part of the story.’ So part of the problem for me was figuring out how I could be true to the three main characters as I saw them, while still making room for Goode.”
The book is a trypic, with a section dedicated to each of those characters: Tolliver, Dr. Artinces Noel, and a young woman named Charlotte Divine. Goode’s presence connects their lives in the structure of the book, just as he does in the fictional community of North Gateway. The three stories weave together seamlessly into not just a tightly plotted mystery, but a period piece and deep character study. And like Abim’s 2010 short story collection, A Taste of Honey, it is one of the few books telling the stories of North St. Louis.
“They're sort of like thank you cards for the people in the community who nurtured me,” Asim says, adding that the directive to tell those stories came from novelist John Edgar Wideman, who’s famous for his stories set in Pittsburgh’s Homewood neighborhood. Eugene Redmond introduced the two at a writers’ conference in New York years ago; Asim says they had a brief and probably perfunctory conversation, but that it has stuck with him always. “Someone should be writing the stories of North St. Louis,” Wideman told him. “There are lots of stories there.”
And with this novel, Asim has proved him right—yet again.
Agate Publishing released Only the Strong on May 12; Asim reads from the book at the St. Louis Public Library’s Carnegie Room on Thursday, June 4 at 7 p.m.
