Blog Tour- Everywhere You Don’t Belong by Gabriel Bump

Everywhere You Don’t Belong, Gabriel Bump’s debut novel, is a coming-of-age story of young Claude McKay Love, growing up in the South Shore neighborhood of Chicago. Abandoned by his mother and father, Claude is raised by his grandma, and her best friend Paul, who on Halloween dresses like a cross between Madonna and Diana Ross, and drank vodka “when he ran out of cigarettes, and the world was closing in on him.”

The story evokes Chicago’s past and present, relieving the nostalgia of the Chicago Bulls glory days to the more contemporary times of Barack Obama and rapper Chief Keef.  

The story, often told from a reminiscent narrator’s point of view, leads us through Claude’s teenage and early college years. Told in short chapters and vignettes, we follow Claude as he grows up on Euclid Avenue with an eccentric grandma who will come to the school wearing a bathrobe and knee-high boots but whose smothering love compensates for her daughter’s abandonment of him. In a poignant scene, the grandma makes Claude watch as she swept pictures of his parents off the piano into the trash can, calling it a cleanse.

 “I failed with your mother,” she tells Claude. “You got something special deep in there. We don’t know what it is yet. We’ll find it.”  

Everywhere You Don’t Belong tells of loss and love, with the most potent storylines involving a violent attack on Claude, his best friend moving away, and his childhood sweetheart Janice.

Claude is a self-described average kid, “bad at sports, no rich parents, no excellent homework to steal and copy.” Haunted by the desertion of his parents, he longs to find his place in a city overrun by violence, spurred by city cops and a street gang called the Redbelters.  

The violence escalates when the Redbelters incite a riot after a police officer killing. Claude eventually escapes the desolation by going away to college in Missouri to pursue a journalism career, only to encounter still issues of not belonging in the face of racism and identity misgivings. 

When Janice shows up and is in trouble, Claude realizes the past is never too far behind. Bump crafts a powerful story with lean and sparse writing, eliciting powerful imagery. The characters will linger with you long after you’ve finished.                

Everywhere You Don’t Belong won the 2020 Ernest Gaines Award for African American Fiction. Algonquin books recently released the paperback edition.