Another Man in the Street by Caryl Phillips

Another Man in the Street

by Caryl Phillips

Farrar, Straus and Giroux 2025

Another Man in the Street, the new book by Caryl Phillips, is billed as a novel but reads much more like that dreaded nonesuch, the novel-in-stories. It starts with the story of a young man from Phillips's native St. Kitts named Victor Johnson, who's saved up enough money to emigrate to England, leaving behind the squalid paradise of his childhood. “Was it wrong to want to see the world?” he asks himself, quite naturally. “Was it wrong to want to get away and become somebody else?” But Victor doesn't end up seeing the world; he stays for a bit in Liverpool and then moves to London to work for a landlord named Peter. And readers have no idea whether or not he becomes somebody else, since they never learn more than a few scraps of who he was back at home.

Not that they learn much more about him in the ensuing 200 pages, in which the narrative focuses on Peter, then Victor, then Ruth as their fairly quotidian lives unfold over a few decades. Phillips never makes any discernible effort to invest his characters with any personality; at no point do readers have any reason to care what happens to any of them, despite the promise of that 'become somebody else' opening.

Instead, things just happen, and everything is written in a flat prose register crawling with clichés. “Soft spot,” “learn the ropes,” “admiring her pluck,” and “didn't know the first thing” all happen on a single page, and people are given a talking to or drink like it's going out of fashion, and so on, everywhere, with scarcely a paragraph of original or interesting writing. Major and minor developments in the lives of the three main characters are covered with clinical dispatch and in identical registers, with the result that the book is as tedious as bank balance sheet. “It was around this time that I started to drink,” Victor relates at one such point, going on to talk, as does everybody else, in lazy clichés: “I'd never been one for indulging and could always be relied upon to keep my wits about me, but things really started to go downhill when ...”

Eventually, not that anybody inside or outside the narrative will care, Victor begins to sicken. “It is now clear to me that Victor pretty much faced every day of his illness with courage,” we're told, and we're just expected to step politely over the sheer blasphemous enormity of that “pretty much,” “but something much more difficult; the courage of resignation.” Some readers might briefly wonder if resignation really does require more courage than bravado, but the feeling will dissipate quickly.

Steve Donoghue is a founding editor of Open Letters Monthly. His book criticism has appeared in The Washington Post, The American Conservative, The Spectator, The Wall Street Journal, The National, and the Daily Star. He has written regularly for The Boston Globe, the Vineyard Gazette, and the Christian Science Monitor and is the Books editor of Georgia’s Big Canoe News