Candice Carty-Williams’s “People Person” takes readers for a spin through south London in a gold Jeep that its owner, Cyril Pennington, treasures more than his five children. The Pennington siblings — Nikisha, Danny, Dimple, Lizzie and Prynce — are each raised by a different mother, with the exception of the eldest and youngest. The novel opens with Cyril taking his brood out for ice cream to awkwardly introduce them to each other. Then he promptly leaves them to live out the rest of their youth.
“Although he was unknowingly a master of detachment,” Carty-Williams writes in the opening pages, “Cyril saw himself as more of a people person than a father.” Indeed, while Cyril’s gregarious persona wins him points with the postman, it does nothing for his relationship with his five children, who remain estranged from both their father and each other as they grow up in south London’s diverse neighborhoods — Brixton, Battersea and Clapham among them.
By its second chapter, “People Person” leaps ahead to the Pennington siblings’ adulthood. Dimple, now a 30-year-old wannabe YouTube influencer, attempts (this time, permanently, she swears) to break up with her abusive boyfriend, Kyron. When their exchange grows violent, and Kyron winds up unconscious on Dimple’s kitchen floor, she enlists her four estranged siblings to help cover up the incident and shield her from Kyron’s wrath when he wakes up and realizes what has occurred.
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While the Kyron incident draws them together, the Pennington siblings truly bond over their persistent desire to win the affection of their father, who makes occasional cameos in their adult lives. Cyril is absent at best and negligent at worst, but his children can’t seem to distance themselves from him, often belittling their mothers’ love in the process. Aptly, “People Person” is dedicated “to all the single mothers. Especially the ones who try their best to raise their children with the love of two parents.”
An homage to the vibrancy of south London’s Black community, the novel features a slate of protagonists who attest to the city’s cosmopolitanism and the spectrum of Black identity. In addition to sharing a Black Jamaican bus-driving father, Nikisha and Prynce are the children of a Black Jamaican mother; Lizzie’s mother is Yoruba; Dimple’s is Indian Jamaican; and Danny’s is “a friendly and more than accommodating petite white woman with a dark blond bob.”
The siblings’ dynamics reflect the politics of ethnicity, colorism and White beauty standards: Danny’s “mixed” features are often sneered at by his siblings, while Nikisha, the eldest, envies Dimple for getting special treatment from Cyril because “her mum is one of them Indian-looking women” and has “good hair.” To compensate, Nikisha makes fun of Dimple’s weight — one of the middle Pennington child’s many insecurities. The array of Black identities, personalities and body types Carty-Williams depicts is refreshing and honest, a far cry from hackneyed media portrayals that present Blackness as a monolith.
A novel for the digital age, “People Person” seamlessly weaves technology into its roving plot. Carty-Williams describes the characters’ deliberate engagement with cellphones and social media, for better or worse, in detail: Dimple doesn’t simply silence her phone; instead, she “turned off airplane mode, and swiped away all of Kyron’s million notifications as they came through.” Her engagement with electronics is tactile rather than passive, and her preoccupations with emoji — modern conduits of feeling — are relatable to younger readers: When Dimple ranks her favorite emoji, she decides “fire was the best, obviously. Heart eyes followed, but she didn’t like them as much. Her least favorite was the crying emoji.”
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And when Dimple’s phone buzzes, she doesn’t need to look: She simply listens “to see if it was one singular buzz (WhatsApp, Insta or Twitter notification), two buzzes (iMessage), or continued buzzing (phone call),” dreading the last option, in true millennial fashion. A passing reference to TikTok psychoanalysis grounds the novel in pandemic-era relevance, although references to the coronavirus pandemic itself are missing, perhaps intentionally, to give “People Person” an escapist feel.
Moments of laugh-out-loud prose punctuate the novel, including a description of Dimple’s nosy White neighbor, Karen, who, true to her name, suspects Dimple and her siblings of illicit activity, based solely on their Blackness. Carty-Williams deftly addresses anti-Black racism and microaggressions, while harnessing the power of comedy to drive her point home.
But, sometimes the writing feels exceedingly casual, with the cadence of a text message exchange rather than a work of literary fiction. At such moments, Carty-Williams leans on exposition over sensory description. Readers learn of Cyril’s gold Jeep, which he purchased with “most, if not all, of the money he should have spent on child support, or even living slightly more comfortably.” Adds Carty-Williams: “He truly loved it more than anything else in his life and he didn’t see a problem with that.” Instances like these are missed opportunities to vividly set the scene and telegraph Cyril’s affection for his car, not through explanation but through evocative description.
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The ambition behind Carty-Williams’s novel calls to mind what Zadie Smith brought to her first novel, “White Teeth.” And to some extent, Carty-Williams is to south London what Smith is to the north: a sharp, humorous voice that paints greater London’s Black communities with the nuance they deserve. Carty-Williams even credits Smith as one of her mentors in the book’s acknowledgments.
But Smith’s ability to thread a series of disparate events together is less assured in Carty-Williams’s novel, which devotes too much time to its exposition. And minor tangents, like a protracted explanation of Danny’s prison stint, distract from Carty-Williams’s ultimate message about the importance of family.
Nevertheless, through her nuanced portrayal of the Pennington siblings, Carty-Williams deftly grapples with the unique challenges they face as Black Londoners. Among them are overcoming White beauty conventions, resisting the looming threat of unjust treatment by police and learning to love themselves as they are — with or without Cyril’s coveted affection.
Meena Venkataramanan writes stories and anchors the About US newsletter at The Washington Post.
People Person
By Candice Carty-Williams
Gallery/Scout Press. 336 pp. $27.99
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