Reading Nigerian writer Eloghosa Osunde’s sophomore novel, “Necessary Fiction,” is an immersive experience.
Inventively bold and affecting, its obsessions go deep but are crystal clear. What does it mean, Osunde asks again and again, to love and be loved, especially as a queer person living in Lagos, Nigeria — where homosexuality is still criminalized, where you could be disowned or killed for loving the wrong person?
The answer lies in the churning, interior lives of the novel’s characters, each spun out as mostly individual stories suffused with tenderness and light. But here’s a tip: Keep that list of characters at the beginning of the book close at hand because, like Osunde’s debut “Vagabonds!,” this new novel, with its nonexistent plot and shifting points of view, is packed with dozens of multifaceted characters that are hard to keep track of. Multigenerational as well, they include sons and their father, mothers and their daughters, students at a boarding school and more.
First, we meet Ziz, a straight-shooting, hustler type who makes enough money to live on his own terms as a gay man in Lagos. “I’m that guy that gets [expletive] done. Simple. Kick me out of the house at fifteen ... and watch me grow some real useful muscle.”
Rejected by an abusive and intolerant father, Ziz, like his best friend Maro, finds a true sense of belonging elsewhere, in partners, in a circle of queer friends who have similar experiences. There’s also main character May, a DJ, whose mother is mentally ill and whose father’s “unending charisma and gaslighting” broke their family apart. Like Ziz, May is a rebel who rejects societal expectations to live more authentically among other “queer creatives.”
But while Ziz and May’s family lives are heartbreaking, Osunde denies them a kind of hopelessness. In fact, she denies all characters this hopelessness: “Life had almost tricked them into thinking other things but the truth was: they were still young, still loved, still hurt in hidden places but not alone, not alone, especially in the dark.” And they had a unique way of coping: “We all had lies we needed to tell ourselves and others if we were going to live well … there’s already a term for that type of lie: necessary fictions.”
When two female characters, Yemisi and Awele, meet in boarding school, they are drawn to each other romantically until a painful separation is forced upon them by an abusive parent. Yemisi is an aspiring photographer and Awele is a writer; they survive on a fair amount of self-compassion and creativity too.
But not all the parents in “Necessary Fiction” are harsh and unyielding; Maro’s father Tega provides a loving, safe space for Akin, an aspiring musician struggling with his own father’s death, among other things. By the end of the book, it is Akin’s success that brings most of the characters together — too conveniently, plot-wise — in a kind of lovefest.
