A Chicagoan Roams Berlin
This article is only a portion of the full article. If you are already a premium subscriber please login. If you are not a premium subscriber, please subscribe for access to all of our content.

Black Deutschland
by Darryl Pinckney
Farrar, Straus & Giroux. 294 pages, $26.

THIS ENGAGING, highly literate second novel by Darryl Pinckney follows a young gay black man’s adventures in Berlin during the 1980s, the final decade of the Cold War. The novel’s narrator, Jed Goodfinch, originally from Chicago, struggles to make a life in Berlin. A recovering alcoholic and drug addict, he spends time at AA meetings, at a straight bar, and with his friends. He falls in love several times, once with a straight man, and works to maintain his job with a controversial architect.