Award-winning fiction writer T. Geronimo Johnson joins co-hosts V.V. Ganeshananthan and Whitney Terrell to talk about his new novel, The Occidental Book of the Dead. He discusses how the book addresses white supremacy and the United States’ deep-seated and racist mythology through the perspective of George Washington Jonson, a black police officer working in a fictional version of Atlanta. Johnson talks about researching police work but almost entirely avoiding depicting scenes of it on the page, and also explains why the book transitions from third to first person. He reflects on how structures of The Egyptian Book of the Dead and other classics are incorporated into the story. He reads from The Occidental Book of the Dead .

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The Occidental Book of the Dead • Hold It ‘Til It Hurts • Welcome to Braggsville

A Man in Full by Tom Wolfe • The Handmaid’s Tale by Margaret Atwood • Autobiography of an Ex-Colored Man by James Weldon Johnson • The Egyptian Book of the Dead , translated by E.A. Wallis Budge • The Consolation of Philosophy by Boethius • Confessions by St. Augustine

EXCERPT FROM A CONVERSATION WITH T. GERONIMO JOHNSON

V. Ganeshananthan : This novel is broken up into different parts, and the first part is written in the third person, and then there’s this shift to [George Washington] Jonson’s first-person voice, which is prefaced with, among other things, a note about how it should not be read aloud. But there’s all of this text appended to the story that gives it the appearance of a certain other kind of story. For example, there’s episode credits or a fake copyright page, and then this perspective rupture. And I want to ask how you developed this structure and if you always knew that this was where you were headed.

T. Geronimo Johnson: No, I didn’t always know I was headed in this direction. At one point the book was, I think, a thousand pages. It covered 400 years, and we learned along the way that Anthony and George Washington Jonson are in family lines that have the same root, like on a plantation. This version also featured several trials. It was framed around these trials that were interrogating Founding Fathers, religious belief[s], and stuff like this.

There was this other legal framework. It was a long case, and after I escaped that, so to speak, there was a point where, as an important early reader said, it felt like there was too much racism in the book, and I didn’t agree at all. But I understood why they felt that way, and they felt that way as I interpreted it, because there was nothing racist happening in this version of the book, but there was a sense that there was all this atmospheric racism. And so the book was haunted in a way, but it wasn’t processing [racism], so I decided that I needed a first-person narrator to actually process what was happening. That was the only way to hold it together. I actually needed a human consciousness that the reader had direct access to, but a consciousness that also felt as if it had access to the reader, so to speak.