LOCAL Houston | The City Guide JUNE 2015 | Page 39

Local June_FinalEDITED.qxp_002houston 5/21/15 7:24 PM Page 39

LOVING DAY,

MY FEELINGS,

BY MAT JOHNSON

BY NICK FLYNN

There’s no other way to say it:
Mat Johnson has presence. Have
you seen his tall frame hanging around at
book signings? Do you follow him on
Twitter, where you’re privy to an often
hilarious stream of wry thoughts? Have
you taken a class from him at the
University of Houston and hung on his
every word? Wherever you’ve seen him,
you’ve sensed his warm presence, his
piercing intelligence and humor.
“Piercing” is certainly the right word for
his new novel, Loving Day, and his good
humor only augments his fearlessness. In
Loving Day, a man returns to America
after a failed marriage and the collapse of his comics shop abroad. He moves into
his father’s house, which seems to be haunted, and eventually discovers a family
secret at a comics convention. The title refers to Loving Day, an unofficial United
States holiday that celebrates interracial marriage, and unsurprisingly, Johnson’s
novel exposes all the contradictions in how we talk about race today. Friendly and
forbidding, hilarious and brutal, intelligent and profane, Loving Day is a vital work
of fiction, and Johnson will pierce all the ways you think about race – though, of
course, he’ll do so with a smile on his face