Razed by TV Sets

Razed by TV Sets  

By Jason McCall 

Autofocus Books, 2024 

Paperback: $16.00 

Genre: Creative nonfiction 

Reviewed by Jacqueline Allen Trimble 

Jason McCall’s Razed by TV Sets is a thoughtful exploration of what it means to be a millennial coming of age during a time of growing commercialization, rising racial violence, and the steady realization that our heroes are as human as we are, so no one is coming to save us. The book is divided into three sections, each titled by sentences connected to television watching: “Scoot Back, You’re Hurting Your Eyes,” “I Was Hoping That Character Wouldn’t Get Killed Off, But I Understood,” “Yeah, Let’s Watch It Together. I’ll Wait for You.” Fourteen essays appear among these sections, with each essay anchored by music, movies, historic events, and celebrities and/or sports figures, those known mostly through the ubiquitous tube. But these stars, whose lives feel intimate coming into our homes daily as they do, are only the catalysts for McCall to chronicle the triumphs and failures of his own life as well as those of American culture over the last few decades. Examining subjects as wide-ranging as the lives of his parents, grandparents, Lil Wayne, Black quarterbacks, Tupac, Kanye, tennis, basketball, and suicide, he weaves stories gleaned from sports, film, and music together with family anecdotes and deeply personal experiences. In McCall’s nimble mind and capable hands, these topics are not disparate at all but part of the connective tissue that makes him a writer and a survivor.  

The first essay, “My Dad Still Watches the NFL,” sets the tone for the collection in its repetition of “this is about” and in its undercutting of that pronouncement with “but it’s not about that,” concluding with the sentence which announces a central theme of the book: “This is about life and letting a black man live.” Throughout the collection, McCall asks how he, as a Black man, can live in a context that insists on telling him who he is, what he can be, and why he should distance himself from Montgomery, Alabama: “When I tell people I’m from Montgomery, Alabama, people give me stories about their parents and great-grandparents who made it out of Alabama.” Whether it be the English teacher so amazed that he could string two sentences together she is unwilling to correct him, or his fellow graduate students in Miami who keep explaining to him how to make his poems more “Alabama,” McCall grapples with the disconnect between who he is and who others imagine him or need him to be. Because the essays are as much memoir as cultural critique, the writer tries to figure out who he imagines himself to be as well, thinking through history, both familial, local and national, and trying to extrapolate truth from American spin.  

In part, all of the essays are about figuring out what is true and how we can know it if we can only see one angle of the truth. In “The True Transported Man,” McCall writes about magic, wrestling, and his brief time in a psych ward for a suicide attempt, concluding the essay with “the only truth is that I am a very good liar who’s getting better every day.” “Tha Carter V Means the South’s Not Dead, Either” connects his grandparents, Lil Wayne, attitudes about the South, death, and the virtue of defiance, using the trajectory of the rapper’s career to examine “the stigma attached to the South even though Southern hip-hop has been the center of hip-hop for two decades” and “patronizing conversations about Southern Food and health because someone wanted to teach me how the South eats its feelings.” His point is to undercut the notion that, like the often underappreciated Lil Wayne, “[to] be Southern is to be less than” or the “South as dead” and proclaim that the “South is alive and defiant.” In fact, defiance is another repeated theme in this volume—schoolmates racing through a speed trap because what can the cops do but give a ticket; the author more wary because defiance, or even perceived defiance, for him may lead to death, such as in the case of Oscar Grant. McCall writes about the twenty-two-year-old Black man killed by a BART policeman and Fruitvale Station, a film by Ryan Coogler, which chronicles his murder, in “Oscar Grant’s America,” an essay about the limiting power of skin color despite the presence of a Black man in the white house: “We love the myth of America because we love the idea of being able to leave our past behind. But, more often than not, the world won’t let us forget who we are.” This essay is a stunner, unflinching in its indictment of the lies we tell as a country and the lies we tell ourselves in order to keep living: “In America, we can look in the mirror one day and say, ‘That’s not me.’ And if we try hard enough, the world might believe us.” 

The last essay of the collection, “On the Anniversary of Your Grandmother’s Death, You Remember,” is a beautifully executed homage to those who came before and the questions that remain unasked about their lives. Again, McCall underpins this essay with popular culture, this time recalling Andre the Giant’s health issues and his illusion of strength to write about the pain often hidden by McCall’s own family members, specifically his grandmother: “You don’t know if it was boldness or fear that brought her back to Alabama. You don’t know if you’ve been writing for twenty-five years to avenge her death or to prove to the same god that took her that your family can’t be erased by a god or a government or a kidney failure.” In many ways, this collection is about not being erased, about revealing what remains hidden, about saying what goes unsaid. It’s also about the obligations McCall, and by extension, the rest of us have to our community (Is it okay to go see Thor: The Dark World as opposed to 12 Years A Slave?), our parents (Can we keep the promise to a worried mother to keep living?) and to the world (“Someone might be waiting on you to study their letters, to show them how to make their name bright enough for the most distant stars to see”).  

McCall’s poetic craft is on full display in his use of repetition, metaphor, and lyrical language that moves through each of these beautifully evocative essays. Many of these read like prose poems, in particular “My Dad Still Watches the NFL,” “We Hate Wonder Woman 1984 Because Nobody Ever Granted Our Wish,” “824 Words,” “When CM Punk Changes His Theme Music, You Must Change Your Life,” and “On the Anniversary of Your Grandmother’s Death.” Each essay in this collection is a carefully-constructed study in navigating a world and world view often shaped by what may not be real—hence the TV sets of the title—and what we cannot know or do not know about ourselves and others. The juxtaposition of cultural productions—movies, music, sports—real world events, and personal experiences is fresh and surprising, making connections that are as entertaining as they are thought-provoking.  Razed by TV Sets is smart, inventive, and well worth our time and attention.   

Jacqueline Allen Trimble lives and writes in Montgomery, Alabama, where she is a Professor of English and the chairperson of Languages and Literatures at Alabama State University. She holds three degrees in English: the B.A. from Huntingdon College, and the M.A. and Ph.D. from the University of Alabama. She is a National Endowment for the Arts Creative Writing Fellow, a Cave Canem Fellow, and a two-time Alabama State Council on the Arts Fellow. American Happiness, her first poetry collection, won the Balcones Poetry Prize, and How to Survive the Apocalypse was named one of the ten best poetry books of 2022 by the New York Public Library.