Post-traumatic

Starred review from February 21, 2022
Johnson explores in her brutally funny and poignant debut a Black Latinx woman’s childhood trauma and daily struggles. Vivian is a 30-something state-appointed attorney in a public psychiatric hospital, advocating for the rights of patients. Among the cases she’s working on is Melissa’s, a teenager recently transferred to the adult unit who pulls a knife on hospital staff. Vivian spends her free time smoking weed with her best friend, Jane, in an effort to cope with the painful elements of her life outside work, such as phone calls with her drunk older brother, Michael, who dances around the sexual abuse inflicted upon them as children by their mother’s boyfriends. She also nurses an eating disorder and goes on many fruitless dates in search of the perfect man. Dark humor is another coping mechanism for Vivian, which Johnson deploys with tremendous skill, as Vivian’s only-between-friends joke about Brown University being a “great place to go if you were abused” leads to she and Jane reflecting on their feelings about the younger generation’s embrace of “lefty-politics stuff,” which they wish had been around when they were coming up. After a tense reunion with Michael and their Puerto Rican mother, Vivian starts to unravel as she considers cutting herself off from her family. The pressures build as she botches Melissa’s case, gets dumped, and has a big fight with Jane. Throughout, Vivian’s confrontational interactions feel achingly true to life. This is revelatory and powerful. Agent: Mariah Stovall. Writers House.

March 1, 2022
A Black Latina lawyer represents patients at a New York psychiatric hospital while struggling with the aftereffects of her own past trauma. Johnson's debut opens with a bang. In the midst of consulting with a new client, Vivian calms a troubled teenager who has just slashed a nurse with a knife. Outwardly she's cool and professional, but once the incident is resolved successfully, Vivian inwardly crumbles, and we soon learn that she's saddled with deep-rooted emotional problems. Haunted by dark memories of childhood sexual abuse, she holds herself together in a state of hypervigilant awareness of possible male violence. A simple subway ride turns into a terrifying adventure in which she's "besieged by animal fear." Vivian can only relax when she's smoking weed with her best friend, Jane, who also survived a dysfunctional, abusive family. A dreaded family reunion in which Vivian's worst fears are realized drives her to a dramatic decision. Will it bring the healing Vivian craves or spiral her further down into a nervous breakdown? While Johnson's theme--how unresolved personal traumas can cripple a life--is compelling, her execution is marred by clunky prose that makes it difficult to connect with the story ("There was something about shallow clich�d lyrics combined with a sweeping sonic landscape in the sterile setting of a CVS, Duane Reade, or Walgreens that always moved her in a Don DeLillo way"). In trying to capture her protagonist's anxious and obsessive state of mind, the author often gets bogged down in details that disrupt the narrative flow. An entire paragraph describing calorie counts as diet-obsessed Vivian agonizes over which snacks to purchase doesn't make for compelling reading. Aside from brutally honest Jane, who calls Vivian out on her self-absorption, the other characters are barely fleshed out. And strangely, the novel hardly delves into the abuse at the core of Vivian's troubles. Her abuser is simply called "the violent man." Buried under excess verbiage, there's a thoughtful novel struggling to come out.

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March 1, 2022
Tenant lawyer Johnson's first novel centers on the erratic and self-conscious life of Vivian, a Black Puerto Rican lawyer in New York City whose clients are patients in mental hospitals. As the story unfolds, the reader discovers that Vivian embodies the titular "post-traumatic" to the fullest, setting the tone for this somewhat depressing novel with a wounded, difficult protagonist. Vivian ruminates endlessly about her interactions with others, from strangers to men she dates, and she is always hyperaware of her surroundings, outright panicking when a ride-sharing driver misses her stop in the fear that she will be raped and killed. She is obsessed about her weight and bodily imperfections. Readers get a glimpse of the root cause of her deep trauma when she goes to the extreme to avoid her immediate family. Vivian is high-strung, funny, and cynical, musing about social and racial injustices, the objectification of women, and the complexities of relationships. Johnson's prose hurries along, embodying Vivian's anxiety, intelligence, and vigilance, resulting in an uneven novel that veers between edgy entertainment and resonant drama.

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