Skinfolk

January 9, 2023
Historian Guterl tracks the highs and lows of growing up in a sui generis household in his emotionally fraught debut. In the early 1970s, young white couple Bob and Sheryl Guterl initiated a “radical experiment”: raising two biological sons alongside four children adopted from Korea, the South Bronx, and Vietnam in a “white clapboard house with a white picket fence” in a suburban New Jersey town “so small and so quaint that it might have been a movie set,” with the hopes of creating an “idyllic, integrated, multicultural utopia” in suburban America. This proved difficult early on, with Guterl and his five siblings aware from an early age that their family looked different from others, and as the siblings matured, racialized prejudice became unavoidable. Judgments and slurs levied by those outside the family damaged its bonds, and an “incident in the basement” between two siblings sent one, a Black boy, down an all-too-familiar road: “Reform schools give way to jails and then prisons and then penitentiaries.” With precision and unwavering care, Guterl explores the ethics involved in his parents’ endeavor and confronts the consequences of even the best intentions. The result is an eye-opening, instructional, and necessary take on race in America. Faith Childs, Faith Childs Literary Agency.

March 1, 2023
Guterl, who chronicled Josephine Baker's second act as adoptive mother to 12 multiracial children in Josephine Baker and the Rainbow Tribe (2014), turns his historian's eye upon his own family in this coming-of-age memoir. Married in the early 1970s, the author's parents knew they would adopt, specifically from overseas. To their children by birth--the author and another son--they added four transracial children by adoption: Bug and Anna from Korea; Bear, who is Vietnamese and Black; and Eddie, a Black boy from the Bronx. In their mostly white, rural New Jersey neighborhood, the Guterls are generally accepted, if seen as a charming anomaly. Guterl focuses much of the story on himself and his closest siblings, Bear and Bug, and on the realities of growing up in a big family. But he is clear-eyed about his privilege, even within his family, and about his parents who, with the best of intentions, have the whiff of white saviors. Readers may wish to hear more from his siblings' voices, but this doesn't detract from this unique perspective on race.

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Starred review from March 1, 2023
An intensely personal account of growing up in a large, multiethnic family. Guterl, professor of Africana studies and American studies at Brown University and author of Seeing Race in America, fashions a moving, elegant memoir of his childhood within the "idealized experiment" of multiracialism created by his visionary White parents, Sheryl and Bob. Born in 1970, the eldest biological child to the lawyer father and homemaker mother in suburban New Jersey, Guterl gained siblings over the years: infant Bug, adopted from Korea; Mark, "another biological white son," born in 1973; Bear, a Black Asian 5-year-old brought out of Saigon in 1975; 13-year-old Anna, "a beautiful Asian-and-white child, a proto-adult and a surrogate mother to us all," in 1977; and Eddie, a Black 6-year-old adopted from the South Bronx in 1983. With children representing "the three great racial divisions of humankind," as Bob said, this multiracial family was an anomaly in the American landscape. "As members of this family, this monument to radical futurity, we live in a house that is both private and public, in a small town that is picture-perfect, in the middle of nowhere," writes Guterl. "There, we are science fiction brought to life. And we are biblical, a living reminder of the world's failures." The author writes poignantly of their home, a place both protective and decorative: The front yard was like a glaringly public theater, while the backyard was the children's private play space. As the children matured and the stewardship role of their extraordinary parents receded, tensions arose when the children were confronted more directly with society's overarching biases and racial expectations. Bob's death served as a major test of the family cohesion, and the author writes elegantly about his funeral, noting "the diversity of the mourning family, our Black and brown and white skin tones, our heads bowed in sorrow, reflecting mutual affection for the dead hero." An earnestly felt, beautifully wrought story of an American family in all its complexity.

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