Acclaimed writer Caryl Phillips returns with another story of an immigrant, struggling to fit in

Since his debut with “The Final Passage” four decades ago, Caryl Phillips has built a reputation as a renowned chronicler of the immigrant experience. His impressive body of work has spanned centuries, traversed the places he has called home — St. Kitts, Britain and now the United States — and centered around characters that are all too often restless and rootless, displaced and dispossessed.

Phillips’ latest novel, his first in seven years, sees him exploring once again the perennial themes of identity, belonging, alienation and the legacy of colonialism. The title, “Another Man in the Street,” suggests a tight focus on one individual. In fact, Phillips attempts a more daring approach by routinely sidelining his male protagonist to track the separate struggles and disappointments of those whose lives he has affected.

When we first meet that main character, he is embarking on a new life in the 1960s. Victor Johnson is 26, “nervous but free” and sailing away from his Caribbean home on a ship bound for England. There, in “the mother land,” far from his cane-cutter father, he is determined to make a new life for himself as a journalist. Once he has set himself up, he intends to bring over his wife, Lorna, and their young son.

However, at his journey’s end, things don’t work out as planned. After trying and failing to secure office work, Victor is forced to take a job as a handyman in a dingy Notting Hill pub on its last legs. Later he becomes a rent collector for Peter Feldman, a landlord with many properties but few moral principles.

Walking the streets, knocking on doors and demanding overdue payment from fellow West Indians proves dispiriting. Fortunately, Victor finds love and support in the arms of Peter’s secretary, Ruth. He also eventually breaks into journalism and, by the 1980s, starts writing for a broadsheet newspaper and harboring hopes that he will make his name recording the trials faced by Black immigrants in Margaret Thatcher’s Britain. But are his own trials finally over?

Phillips has written an absorbing tale about the difficulties of settling down and fitting in. Victor isn’t the only one battling the odds and striving to be accepted by society. In two separate backstories, we learn how Ruth’s life turned upside down in her teens and how Peter endured hardship as a young Jewish refugee. Phillips switches between his characters’ points of view, allowing us to see Victor from different angles. The drawback with this kind of storytelling is that the novel’s narrative flow is occasionally impeded and some sections are more interesting than others.

Yet Phillips serves up powerful meditations on race, and brilliantly articulates his three lead characters’ ambitions, fears, frustrations and thwarted dreams. Even readers with the hardest of hearts may find they have something in their eye by the time they get to the book’s tender closing pages.

Malcolm Forbes, who also has written for the Washington Post and Wall Street Journal, lives in Edinburgh, Scotland.

Another Man in the Street

By: Caryl Phillips.

Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 222 pages, $27.