Review: "Night Hawks" by Charles Johnson

I can recall in past reviews of short story collections that a lack of cohesion in the stories or no concrete sense of uniform themes was a knock against the book as a whole. I don’t know if I was wrong or if the stories themselves were the problem, but Night Hawks, the most recent short story collection from American writer Charles Johnson just might be the most scattered and diverse short story collection I have ever read, but it also might be one of the best. Instead of hindering the reading experience, the difference found in story to story structure of this book acts not only as a breath of fresh air (never once leaving the reader reeling from the dramatic shift in locale, time period or even style) but as a summation of one writer’s love of the art of the form and of writing itself. I have read one of Johnson’s books before this, his National Book Award-winning novel Middle Passage (it’s been almost a decade since I have read it and do not remember much of it), but it did not prepare me for this collection at all, which is equal parts playful and dead serious, deadpan and emotionally riveting. Like always, I will be discussing a handful of the short stories in the collection, but I can safely say that there is not a weak one in the whole book, although some I liked more than others. The collection opens up with “The Weave”, where Ieesha a recently fired beautician, with the help of her loving boyfriend, breaks into her old beauty shop to steal a large sum of hair extensions, which, as noted in the stories epigraph, are worth more money than you might think. It is a good intro to this varied collection, exhibiting Johnson’s knack for profundity that feels well earned even though the story is only a few ages long. It has a complexity that was really refreshing (such as the reason Ieesha got fired) and is ended as perfect as any short story can end. The symbolism in these stories are great, like the film projector in “Kamadhatu: A Modern Sutra” (one of two stories that reflect Johnson’s Buddhist philosophy) which comes to represent the main character’s desperately sought nirvana, or the jewels stolen by the impoverished narrator of “Occupying Arthur Whitfield”, whose act of robbery reveals hidden depths and pain in a person he projected his desperation onto. What really caught me off guard were the science fiction infused stories found here, such as the amusing but clunky “Guinea Pig” or “4189” a brutal dystopian tale infused with graphic sex and uncanny robots with one of the most brutally unhappy endings I have come across in recent memory. The collection is capped off beautifully by the title story, which fictionalizes (maybe) the author’s late night dinners with late playwright August Wilson, using the quant setting and a bit of shocking violence at the end to speak candidly on life, race and the efficacy of their creative pursuits. I found this collection wholly remarkable, and for someone who has spent the past few years trying to find his way through this dwindling art form, its importance and relevance are invaluable. 

Rating: 5/5