Interspersed between these long winded stories are short sentences detailing the actions that are being carried out, whether it’s the hammering of a 2×4 or the digging out of bricks from the rubble. They impart an importance in their mundanity.

They aren’t just there to fill space, either. Onyebuchi makes you feel like you’re listening in to their lives while they’re out building a house, or taking one down. The interruptions people make with side comments, the questions that propel the narrative, the emotional reactions of the listeners that all serve to speed up or slow down one’s storytelling are pitch perfect. His grasp of dialogue, especially when it comes to how people tell the insane stories that make up their lives, is near unparalleled.

Luckily, Onyebuchi’s writing continues to astound me. It’s both exciting and daunting as there is very little breathing room. Onyebuchi makes the reader slow down, and work through the story by employing a non-linear structure (for the most part), and barely hints at who is currently the protagonist. It is not light, despite the myriad jokes, and it’s not easy to take in despite its relevance to current events. Not only in terms of the subject material Onyebuchi tackles, but also in the way he writes it. I’m no stranger to challenging reads, so believe me when I say this, Goliath is a task of a novel. And now, some of those in the colonies are looking back at Earth in the hopes of a new start, moving their lives into the neighborhoods previous generations left behind. Sometimes they even tear down housing to send the materials into space where it will be used to create more room in the colonies. They cobble together their lives, making communities within the salvage and wreckage of the buildings left behind. Most white Americans, especially those with the means to do so, have moved off planet to inhabit “the colonies.” The people left behind in New Haven are for the most part black and/or Puerto Rican. The United States is an irradiated land with pockets of civilization contained to once-great urban centers. Goliath is more a future history meshed with the fever dream of swirling vignettes surrounding the community of New Haven, Connecticut in the decade of the 2050s than it is an easily distilled narrative. Goliath, is a towering look at a dismal future that is filled with a few small bright moments of people living in the world they were left behind in.

So I knew I had to keep an eye out for Onyebuchi’s first adult novel. It was one of my instant favorites, and I still feel the righteous anger that poured out of that book. Tochi Onyebuchi’s novella hit very close to home considering the events of 2020 following the police killing of George Floyd. Back in 2020, Jesus, yeah, two years ago, I read a little novella by the name of Riot Baby.

Goliath onyebuchi novel