ZZ Packer
Books
ZZ, 30
by Paula Morris
One of the hottest new literary talents in America is black, beautiful and, strangely, a short story writer.
ZZ Packer arrives late for our interview, carrying a very large bag and talking into a very small cellphone. The bag is full of books, because she hates being all dressed up with nothing to read, and the cellphone keeps her connected to her real life in northern California: she has taken a four-month leave of absence from home and husband to teach at the University of Iowa, one of her numerous alma maters, for a semester.
In a college town such as Iowa City, the vivacious Packer stands out from the crowd, not only because she talks in the kind of loud voice that only very charming Americans can get away with. She’s a glamorous black woman in a place populated by blondes in jogging shorts with IOWA printed across the butt. She’s easy to spot at readings and parties, her hair in a stylish pile, wearing the jewel colours so beloved of those What Not to Wear harridans, looking intense and brainy and … well, successful.
At just 30, Packer – she was baptised Zuwena but dubbed ZZ early on – has managed to score the young story-writer’s holy trinity of wishes: the coup of two stories in the New Yorker; publication of her first collection, Drinking Coffee Elsewhere; and lavish lashings of critical praise.
Packer even got to tout her book on television, one of only a handful of literary types to make it onto the celeb-weary couch at NBC’s Today Show. She was invited there by no less a personage than literary elder statesman John Updike.
Cynics might suggest that Packer’s glossy good looks are the key to her star power, placing her in the same well-
educated, dark-skinned category as Jhumpa Lahiri, Hari Kunzru and Monica Ali. But Drinking Coffee Elsewhere is a bold, attention-grabbing sort of book, and Packer’s style is vivid and direct, a world away from the supposed New Yorker model of flat tone, few events and an easy-to-miss epiphany.
Despite the collection’s title, it’s light on self-absorbed café (or wine bar) malingerers, introducing instead a range of black characters with compelling, often twisted stories to tell. A young man travels to the Million Man March, but only because he has been coerced into hawking overpriced exotic birds along the route with his loser father. An over-lively black Brownie troop are determined to “kick the asses of each and every” white girl sharing their camp after a perceived slight; they don’t realise until too late that the white girls are “delayed learners”. In the title story, Dina, a misanthropic black Yale student, makes a joke about a gun during banal orientation activities and finds herself consigned to psychiatric counselling, tormented by well-meaning counsellors who speak to her “in an I’m-down-with-the-struggle voice”.
Racism is an insidious presence in every story, but Packer is not interested in saintly victims or easy targets. Dina in “Drinking Coffee Elsewhere” is a surly liar, in denial about her sexuality and her past. Trying to keep his minority student happy, the dean at Yale offers to pay all her expenses to attend a friend’s funeral, but can’t resist getting in a jibe about paying “for some lessons in manners”. Dina is suitably ungrateful. “These people wanted you to owe them for everything,” she fumes.
In “Speaking in Tongues”, a runaway sleeps in a white woman’s car overnight, but when she’s chased down, she pretends to be an innocent bystander, doing her “best to look aghast, wronged, mortified. ‘You must think we all look alike!’” In “Brownies”, the narrator tells a story about her father abusing the Mennonite custom of never refusing a favour by ordering a family to paint his porch: “He said … it was the only time he’d have a white man on his knees doing something for a black man for free.”
Packer is keenly aware of the role race plays in the lives of all black Americans: her family history reads like a case study of black flight. Her parents abandoned segregated Mississippi in the 1960s for what she calls “the promised land” of
Chicago, where she was born. But in Chicago, “neighbourhoods were divided by their ethnicity, and people rarely went out of them”, says Packer. So her family moved from Chicago’s south side to the southern suburbs of Atlanta in search of “more opportunity, less ghettoisation”.
Neither really worked out. Her father lost his liquor-store business, and her parents divorced. (“We got incredibly poor,” she says, frankly. “And I only saw white people on TV.”) Packer moved again, this time with her mother and younger sister to Lexington, Kentucky, where she was one of the few black students in advanced placement classes. “I was eager to excel, because I’ve always been a good girl.” In fact, Packer was an affirmative-action recruiter’s dream, and her passion for electronics (“I built robots and circuits”) won her a place at Yale to study electrical engineering.
Her ambivalent response to entering Yale’s “world of privilege” helped inform Drinking Coffee Elsewhere’s stunning title story. Packer’s protagonist, Dina, is struck by the difference between seedy “crumpled” New Haven and the ostentation-gothic facades of Yale: “I imagined how the college must have looked when it was founded,” Dina thinks, “when most of the students owned slaves.”
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