Sep 25, 2026 · 51 min · 22 segments
The Grammy-winning singer, songwriter and guitarist has one foot in traditional bluegrass and another in improvisational jam music. He has a new album, *So Much for Goodbyes*, inspired by his late…
John Powers
David Bianculli
In his new novel, The Disappearers, the Booker Prize-winning author Marlon James chronicles the events surrounding a vicious anti-gay attack in Jamaica in the late 1980s.
The New York Times book critic Dwight Garner declared the book a masterpiece, calling it the novel of the decade and possibly the century thus far.
Our critic at large, John Powers, says that The Disappearers shows James to be one of those writers you just have to read.
The fantasy of Jamaica is of an outpost of pleasure, with shimmering white beaches, James Bond seducing sexy women in mountain resorts, and Bob Marley singing his gorgeous songs of unity and love.
But if you're gay, you know that Jamaica has long been known as probably the most dangerously homophobic country on earth.
That reality forms the backdrop to The Disappearers, the blazing new novel by Marlon James, the gay Jamaican writer who won the 2015 Booker Prize for A Brief History of Seven Killings, and will probably win again for this one.
Giving us, as one character says, the Jamaica underneath the Jamaica we know, this fiercely personal book doesn't merely tell a story.
Churning with passion and ideas, history and wit, graphic sex and graphic violence, the book howls with so much pain and anger that it's as if James wrote it with his own bodily fluids.
Spanning the age-shadowed years from 1988 to 2005, The Disappearers is tricky to describe because it's divided into five parts, each with a different tone and central figure.
It begins in high spirits with the diary of Eddie Porteous, a white-skinned biracial student who lands a role in the production of an openly queer play.
There he meets the three other key characters, handsome Matt Chinn, a mysterious soul whom Eddie fancies, the velvet-jacketed Havelock Titus, the worldly older man who's directing the play, and above all, Jordan Brown, a cynical would-be sexual outlaw who's been thrown out of his home and lives by hustling.
All their lives change when a rehearsal is set upon by a gay-hating mob that's led by a famous reggae singer and includes guys trying to exorcise their own homosexual feelings.
These louts batter the cast and crew with billy clubs and tire irons, gouging out one victim's eyes and murdering another, sexually desecrating his body.
When the survivors get taken to the hospital, they're treated coldly by medical personnel who believe they deserve their wounds for being baddie boys, as gay men are insultingly called there.
While this vicious assault is only a tiny part of the book, James makes it indelible and far from gratuitous.
Like such towering modern novelists as Gabriel Garcia Marquez, Toni Morrison, Roberto Bolaño, and Elena Ferrante, James uses physical violence to explore social violence, the structures of oppression that its victims must fight to survive.
Indeed, the majority of The Disappearers follows the main characters as they try to cope with what's befallen them, often tying themselves into emotional knots.
Some, like Matt, simply vanish, with Eddie and Jordan trying to find him.
But the others disappear in different ways, lying low, going into exile, getting AIDS, making a protective heterosexual marriage, sinking into madness, or setting out on a secret path of dragon tattoo-style vengeance.
Jordan, who says he wants to kill the bleeping world, has a searing encounter with one of the men who brutalized him.
The Disappearers makes you feel in your gut how scary and isolating it was to be gay in 80s Jamaica, a land so homophobic that parents demonized their own children and crowds cheered on the cops who beat them.
Yet if James' main achievement was to simply show this bigotry, or to suggest that it's wrong, his novel would be no greater than an article in The Atlantic or an earnest Sundance movie.
In fact, what makes the book unforgettable is the raw energy of James' storytelling, his ability to conjure up all the many textures of lived experience, including hope.
In his new novel, The Disappearers, the Booker Prize-winning author Marlon James chronicles the events surrounding a vicious anti-gay attack in Jamaica in the late 1980s.
The New York Times book critic Dwight Garner declared the book a masterpiece, calling it the novel of the decade and possibly the century thus far.
Our critic at large, John Powers, says that The Disappearers shows James to be one of those writers you just have to read.
The fantasy of Jamaica is of an outpost of pleasure, with shimmering white beaches, James Bond seducing sexy women in mountain resorts, and Bob Marley singing his gorgeous songs of unity and love.
But if you're gay, you know that Jamaica has long been known as probably the most dangerously homophobic country on earth.
That reality forms the backdrop to The Disappearers, the blazing new novel by Marlon James, the gay Jamaican writer who won the 2015 Booker Prize for A Brief History of Seven Killings, and will probably win again for this one.
Giving us, as one character says, the Jamaica underneath the Jamaica we know, this fiercely personal book doesn't merely tell a story.
Churning with passion and ideas, history and wit, graphic sex and graphic violence, the book howls with so much pain and anger that it's as if James wrote it with his own bodily fluids.
Spanning the age-shadowed years from 1988 to 2005, The Disappearers is tricky to describe because it's divided into five parts, each with a different tone and central figure.
It begins in high spirits with the diary of Eddie Porteous, a white-skinned biracial student who lands a role in the production of an openly queer play.
There he meets the three other key characters, handsome Matt Chinn, a mysterious soul whom Eddie fancies, the velvet-jacketed Havelock Titus, the worldly older man who's directing the play, and above all, Jordan Brown, a cynical would-be sexual outlaw who's been thrown out of his home and lives by hustling.
All their lives change when a rehearsal is set upon by a gay-hating mob that's led by a famous reggae singer and includes guys trying to exorcise their own homosexual feelings.
These louts batter the cast and crew with billy clubs and tire irons, gouging out one victim's eyes and murdering another, sexually desecrating his body.
When the survivors get taken to the hospital, they're treated coldly by medical personnel who believe they deserve their wounds for being baddie boys, as gay men are insultingly called there.
While this vicious assault is only a tiny part of the book, James makes it indelible and far from gratuitous.
Like such towering modern novelists as Gabriel Garcia Marquez, Toni Morrison, Roberto Bolaño, and Elena Ferrante, James uses physical violence to explore social violence, the structures of oppression that its victims must fight to survive.
Indeed, the majority of The Disappearers follows the main characters as they try to cope with what's befallen them, often tying themselves into emotional knots.
Some, like Matt, simply vanish, with Eddie and Jordan trying to find him.
But the others disappear in different ways, lying low, going into exile, getting AIDS, making a protective heterosexual marriage, sinking into madness, or setting out on a secret path of dragon tattoo-style vengeance.
Jordan, who says he wants to kill the bleeping world, has a searing encounter with one of the men who brutalized him.
The Disappearers makes you feel in your gut how scary and isolating it was to be gay in 80s Jamaica, a land so homophobic that parents demonized their own children and crowds cheered on the cops who beat them.
Yet if James' main achievement was to simply show this bigotry, or to suggest that it's wrong, his novel would be no greater than an article in The Atlantic or an earnest Sundance movie.
In fact, what makes the book unforgettable is the raw energy of James' storytelling, his ability to conjure up all the many textures of lived experience, including hope.
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