First Impressions
Dominion is so skilfully written and creative that it was a genuine pleasure to read. This is fiction that feels new, exciting, and full of real vigour. It's also a genuinely thrilling story, with a lot of dramatic events packed into a relatively short book that’s just under 200 pages. This debut novel is set in the year 2000 in the fictional town of Dominion, Mississippi.
Premise
The novel centers on a teenage boy named Manny who is often referred to as "Wonder Boy." He’s the golden child of one of the community's most prominent families. His father is a widely respected reverend and the family is well-off. Manny excels at sports and academics, extremely popular in the community. But there's a great deal about this young man that most people don't know or understand, and crucially, for most of the novel, we never actually get his own perspective directly. Instead, we see him filtered through the two women closest to him. First there's Priscilla, his mother and the reverend's wife: beautiful, no-nonsense, and someone who's known for a long time that her outwardly pious husband is, underneath it all, quite the hypocrite; she also carries a longstanding hip injury from an accident in her youth. Then there's Diamond, Manny's seventeen-year-old girlfriend, deeply in love with him. The novel moves back and forth between these two first-person perspectives, giving us a rounded, layered picture of this young man and the crisis he's moving through: trying to live up to everything expected of him while wrestling with unruly desires and a viscious strain of selfishness, the sense that his own wants are the only ones that matter.
Crucially, the novel never simply paints him as a monster, even though he does some genuinely monstrous things over the course of the story. He's a complicated young man, but the book is really about these two women, their own complicated paths, and what it means to live inside a largely patriarchal, deeply religious community full of social expectation and rumor, where maintaining a good public standing matters enormously.
Language and Craft
Something I admire about this novel is its unique, precise metaphorical language, which gives such a strong sense of these women's sensibility and worldview. There are so many lines where the prose genuinely crackles: the reverend is described as"4:30 hot," the hour when the day's heat peaks; a room's interior is "hot as armpits"; church hats become "helmets of salvation"; a woman's tired back is "ready to retire." These images are so precise that I understood exactly what was being conveyed, while also being filtered through a very specific sensibility that let me feel the texture of these characters' lives and the culture they come from.
Structurally, alongside the alternating first-person sections from Priscilla and Diamond, the novel includes printed sections of sermons, seemingly notes or outlines belonging to the reverend, possibly even typed up by Priscilla herself, which do real work establishing the community's values and the questions its members are wrestling with. There are also short, cryptic sections headed only by strange numbers, presented in Manny's own first-person voice. I genuinely struggled to work out what these were at first, wondering if they referred to some kind of file or case number, until I came across a Goodreads reader's theory that they're dates counting backward, meaning these are likely diary entries from Manny across the years leading up to 2000. That reading feels right to me, and these fragments eventually reveal something much bigger about who Manny really is and the secrets he's carrying.
A Pivotal, Ambiguous Scene
Partway through, there's a scene where Manny, out running alone, is kissed by another young man. I won't give away what follows, but it leads to a great deal more drama, and the moment itself is genuinely ambiguous, open to interpretation depending on how you read his reaction. On the surface, it could suggest repressed desire, but I think it's more about aspects of his character he can't fully allow himself to acknowledge, given the constrictions of the world he's grown up in and the expectations placed on him: even entertaining the possibility of being gay or bisexual would carry consequences he can't countenance, and we see some of those consequences play out almost immediately. There's also a clear biblical undertone here, an echo of Judas's kiss of betrayal, and the novel elsewhere raises the question of whether Judas can really be blamed for playing a role he was, in some sense, preordained to play. That same moral ambiguity runs through Manny: is he ultimately a saint or a sinner? The novel suggests he's genuinely both, and uses that tension to probe a bigger question: what do we actually owe, or know, about our own children?
Strangers We Thought We Knew
As the story unfolds and more comes to light, Priscilla and her husband, the reverend, have to reckon with who their son actually is, and how much they're willing to keep hidden versus expose, both for the sake of their own reputation and, they'd like to believe, for his soul. At one point the novel notes it would be far easier to sweep his transgressions under the rug than to risk their own being exposed in turn. It made me think of a line from Andrew Solomon's nonfiction book “Far From the Tree”, which I read years ago and admired greatly, and which I coincidentally saw quoted again recently in Patrick Radden Keefe's “London Falling”, a completely different kind of book that nonetheless centers on a son who turns out to be a stranger to his own parents: "Parenthood abruptly catapults us into a permanent relationship with a stranger, and the more alien the stranger, the stronger the whiff of negativity." That's exactly the terrifying question “Dominion”confronts: what do we do when the person we thought we knew and loved turns out to be, in crucial ways, a stranger to us?
Diamond
Diamond is a fascinating character in her own right: beautiful, but shaped by real hardship, having been abandoned as a child by her mother and her mother's partner, left to fend for herself and her siblings. She's someone longing for love and family in a way she's never really had. I loved one small moment where she reflects on watching The Cosby Show as a child and finding its version of family completely false, in contrast to Bob Ross, whom she considers genuinely real, a funny, telling detail about her character.
Where It Could Have Gone Further
I can see why some readers might be critical of this book, and I felt a bit of that myself: events move quickly, and the novel flips through a lot of material fairly abruptly. I could easily have read another hundred and fifty pages of this, with room for fuller character development. At the same time, I admire the sheer compression here, which is part of where the book gets its power. My other small reservation is with a shift in Priscilla's character, and particularly her relationship to Diamond, toward the end, which felt a little too swift and neatly resolved for me, though I understand the case for it, given how much Priscilla has endured and how her long-held position in the community, she's literally referred to by some as "the first lady", might understandably shift once she decides she's had enough. I did really appreciate how her private, repressed erotic longings are handled in the book, in real contrast to her husband's own indulgences, and I found myself hoping the story might eventually let her explore those desires in reality rather than leaving them confined to her imagination.
Verdict
I appreciated so much about this novel: its complexity, and the sheer richness of Citchens's language bringing it all to life. It was a great delight to read. It’s a genuinely accomplished piece of literature and, given the prize recognition it's already picked up, I expect it will keep earning more. If you've read this debut, I'd love to hear what you thought of it.
