We know Javi is up to something, since he employs defense as offense from the start. “I wasn’t trying to play victim,” he begins, “until the world taught me what a powerful grift it is.” Thus embarks our descent into Andrew Boryga’s debut novel Victim: the satirical story of Bronx native Javier “Javi" Perez, who learns to craft – and sell – narratives around his identity in pursuit of recognition as a writer.
Initially, Javi’s self-commodification is amusingly innocent: he is baffled when his guidance counselor suggests he write his college essay about being “poor” and his friend Gio’s incarceration. However, Javi starts rooting his ethos as a writer in increasingly fabricated tales of racial injustice, until he is inextricable from a self-constructed, Twitter-validated web of lies.
Boryga doesn’t shy away from this hunger driving his protagonist, which arose over his past decade of working on Victim. Javi was inspired by Boryga’s life, but he only started to “take shape” once Boryga divorced Javi from himself, letting his character take on unsavory hues: like learning about structural oppression to get into a girl’s pants. Javi is no saint, but his humorous dishonesty compels us to keep listening until the ultimate implosion of his farce.
The cornerstone of Victim is its nonstop caricature of racial discourse. We laugh when Mr. Martin calls Javi’s mom “kind of an immigrant” for coming from Puerto Rico via plane and not boat; we laugh when Javi tries proselytizing her about internalized racism for dating a white man. We laugh, until Boryga catches us red-handed in our own laughably paltry attempts at racial justice: whether we’re Javi’s girlfriend Anais insisting “we’re not gentrifiers. We’re brown” about a shiny Brooklyn apartment, or his white editor, emphatically agreeing to “do better.” And in case we look away, Boryga gazes at us directly in quiet, lucid beats – from noting “yet another murder of a young man” by the police, to Javi’s hope to grow beyond someone “used for trauma clicks” into “someone with a voice.”
Satirical callouts of identity literature aren’t new. The Oscar-nominated film American Fiction, R.F. Kuang’s Yellowface, Charles Yu’s Interior Chinatown, and others explore our vulturine consumption of “diverse” stories. The protagonists of those stories vary from the high-and-mighty intellectual, Thelonious “Monk” Ellison, to the opportunistic June Hayward. But like Javi, they both are renditions of the literary scammer, falsely appropriating a narrative that they do not own.
These scams aren’t too far outside the realm of possibility. Javi’s work echoes how comedian Hasan Minhaj made up anecdotes on racism in his comedy specials. Like Minhaj claiming his “emotional truths,” Javi defends the “core truth” of his work, and Boryga toys with such complexities of truth through the irony saturating Victim. Was Javi’s calm encounter with a policeman neutral, an instance of racial profiling (as his article dramatizes), or somehow both? The novel challenges us to consider the implications of electing one – or all – to believe in.
These novels end exactly as they begin – with another grift. Victim concludes with a soliloquy of sorts where Javi informs us that he wrote Victim. A recursive trick: like American Fiction, where we discover that Monk is adapting his story of writing a stereotypical Black novel into the film itself. Yellowface similarly concludes with June, a white woman who plagiarized a Chinese-American writer’s work, planning to write another book depicting herself as a victim to the “rotten foundations” of the writing industry.
These recursions critically embody the cannibalistic state of the identity narrative. Society is “woke” enough for diversity to be a market demand, so we produce stories about identity, then stories about stories about identity: and we – across creeds – consume it all and ask for seconds. What could be an easier way to offer moral gratification than dishing up commentary on injustice, or better yet, commentary on that commentary? With readers eager to tut about society’s woes and appraise them for moral returns, no wonder we’d enhance and auction off narratives of inequity we genuinely hoped to share.
Still, these U-turn endings feel like an easy escape. “You created me,” Javi claims. “You’re not innocent either.” An apt callout, but how do we repent? Is it possible to consume stories like Victim without a tinge of complicity? Or do we concede that reading while being complicit is better than not reading at all? Without a clear direction or foray to sever this cycle of identity commodification, Javi’s accusation rings hollow.
To be fair, Javi’s (ostensibly) honest writing of Victim may be such an attempt: to simply share his story without grandstanding about identity. But his ending – a mostly anonymous life with his mom and Gio – still feels like a retreat. In Interior Chinatown, Willis Wu similarly sheds stereotypical, Asian male roles to focus on his family, and people do deserve lives beyond their marginalized identity. But is Boryga’s answer to racial pigeonholing this unsatisfactory binary: either being subsumed by identity politics, or quietly plodding along with “the hand [you’re] dealt”?
Perhaps this nods to the opposite poles Boryga has experienced: from feeling like a tokenized writer early in his career, as the editor’s note for Victim mentions; to now encouraging others to “ignore all of this ‘discourse’” and focus on their craft. The very conceit of Victim may be this pendulum-like trap between the political and personal: and how difficult it is for marginalized people to value one without sacrificing – or being denounced by – the other.
With such unresolvable loops and ironies, Victim shrewdly reflects our era of superficial diversity discourse and how we cannibalize minoritized stories (This review is no different, as yet another iteration of a snake swallowing its own tail). And we keep repeating the cycle: maybe because we want justice, or because we want the dividends from engendering that justice. Who knows? As Javi puts it, “The quest for truth is the furthest thing from simple.”
This book was provided as a review copy from Doubleday.
2025