‘Welcome to Braggsville’: Author earns bragging rights

'Welcome to Braggsville” (William Morrow, 355 pages, $25.99), the new novel by Iowa Writers' Workshop grad and current visiting professor T. Geronimo Johnson, is an awe-inspiring combination of essential story and breathtaking storytelling.

First, the story: A young man from small town Georgia - alternately known as D'aron and Daron to highlight the various worlds he seeks to inhabit - brings three of his Berkeley classmates home to create a performative protest of the town's Civil War re-enactment. When their scheme goes horribly awry, issues of truth, intent, race, friendship, community, and more are examined and distorted in the harsh, context-free light of news media and social media.

The storytelling: Johnson has crafted a unique narrative style that upends expectations and draws us deeper into the story. The book is concerned with many of the same issues found in Johnson's first novel, 'Hold it 'Til it Hurts,” but 'Welcome to Braggsville” is a significant stylistic departure from its more straightforward predecessor. In the new book, Johnson blends voices, adopts and discards academic tropes, invokes the dead, and challenges the reader to keep up and decode the text. The book rewards careful, thoughtful reading.

'Welcome to Braggsville” is a social satire that takes aim at the absurdities that underpin institutions, communities and individual approaches to the world. The book is an indictment, the broadness of which is calling everyone to take a hard look at assumptions, biases and affectations.