The Long Assembly: T. Geronimo Johnson Talks Structure, Racism, and Finishing What Matters

By Andy — 2026-10-08 — Literary News

The novel grew to a thousand pages at one point. Then it got shorter, leaner, transformed into something else entirely—a shift that happened only when Johnson understood what the book actually needed.

T. Geronimo Johnson's new novel, *The Occidental Book of the Dead*, sits at the intersection of race, policing, and the mythologies America tells itself. The protagonist is George Washington Jonson, a Black police officer working in a fictional Atlanta. What begins in third person suddenly ruptures into first—a formal choice that wasn't always the plan.

The original manuscript was enormous. It stretched across four centuries, explored family genealogies connecting Anthony and George Washington Jonson to the same plantation roots, and hung itself on a series of trials interrogating the Founding Fathers and religious belief. Early readers felt something atmospheric about the racism—present everywhere and nowhere. The book was haunted but not processing.

That's when Johnson knew he needed a narrator. Not for decoration. For consciousness.

He needed a human voice that the reader could access directly, one that also seemed to be reaching back toward the reader. Something to hold the sprawl together. The shift to first person, paired with structural inspiration from medieval texts like Boethius's *The Consolation of Philosophy* and Augustine's *Confessions*, gave the novel its skeleton. Everything else took time.

Years of time.

When Johnson talks about finishing work, he doesn't invoke inspiration or muse-talk. He talks about obligation—to the people who died so he could read, to teachers and the writing community, to the fact that not finishing would be squandering something borrowed. He's pathologically determined, as he puts it. A Black man in America with something to say. The tank runs low, but there's always gas left for that.

The novel itself examines how structures of corruption work—not through explicit dramatisation of police procedure, but by showing how lies escalate after a single violent confrontation between a white teenager and Jonson. The book splits narratively as his life splits. It asks readers to sit with the weight of what it costs to survive inside a broken system, what compromises feel like from the inside.

Johnson's prose does something unsettling. It's funny in a way that makes you uncomfortable. Early sections flirt with noir sensibilities. His protagonist's voice carries longing, anger, confusion, desperation all at once. The novel spans two decades, introduces a sprawling cast whose connections don't clarify until late, and wanders deliberately into history, sociology, economics, and popular culture. It's a lot to ask of a reader.

Worth asking, though.

Source: "The exchange is a fitting example of what makes "The Occidental Book of the Dead," the third novel from T. Geronimo Johnson, so effective — it's bitterly funny, but also speaks to the reality of a racism so ingrained in the country that people still feel entitled to make thoughtless, or worse, comments disguised as praise." — The Boston Globe