A poet’s novel of utopia shows less an ideal than, perhaps, a road map

Book Review Ours By Phillip B. Williams Viking: 592 pages, $32 If you buy books linked on our site, The Times may earn a commission from Bookshop.org, whose fees support independent bookstores. He’s surrounded by the residents of the neighborhood: “Yes, they had left something behind to stand in that street together, blocked off from touching him and told to ‘Back up,’ had it yelled at them as though they were to have as little care and consideration for the boy as the ones who had shot him.” From this contemporary opening, Williams takes readers back in time to the 1830s, when a woman known as Saint travels around Arkansas, freeing the enslaved and indirectly killing their so-called masters. There’s a lot that Saint doesn’t know, doesn’t quite remember, but what she’s convinced of is that in order to keep the townspeople, called the Ouhmey, safe, she must keep them physically nearby and emotionally at a distance, for “if there’s anything more shockingly unpredictable than freedom, it’s love.” Saint is only one of many characters whose stories unfold over the course of this deeply absorbing novel. It’s just not very evenly distributed.” Dystopian fiction, John Scalzi wrote for The Times a few years ago, “lets us simulate our worst imaginings from the private security of our own homes, the better to avoid them in the real world.” The problem, of course, is that we haven’t managed to avoid many trappings of dystopian fiction: a rapidly changing climate and its attendant human displacement ; the rise of fascist ideas and rhetoric; a seemingly ever-widening income gap ; several ongoing genocides ; billionaires building bunkers in case of some worldwide cataclysmic event. Williams writes in his author’s note at the end of the book that “Ours” is his attempt “at creating a contemporary mythology for Blackness in the United States of America.” He says he “aimed to write an epic taking place during the antebellum period where slavery is not the main antagonist without disregarding or disappearing the enslaved.” In other words, the author’s own framework doesn’t include the idea of utopia.