Just before dawn outside of a two-bedroom apartment in Chicago’s Naperville suburb, a middle-aged Black man struggles to get his maroon hatchback to start. His teenage stepson, who is white, sits beside him in the passenger seat, barely conscious, wearing only a hoodie despite the frigid January cold.
It’s 1992, and the pair has risen early to deliver phonebooks before Jim works his shift at the grocery store and Nathan goes to high school. With significant effort, Jim eventually gets the car going. On the ride to the warehouse, Nathan asks why he has to tag along on this errand. Jim doesn’t have a good answer. Jim doesn’t have many answers. He doesn’t know how he’s going to make ends meet for his family of seven—a white wife, two white stepsons, and three mixed children he and his wife share. He doesn’t know when or if the race-related bullying he and his family experience will end. He doesn’t actually know if life will ever get easier for them. And neither do we. This is where the book begins.
Defiant Acts is James Stewart III’s debut novel, written as a series of slice-of-life vignettes that read like a memoir, and may very well be the autobiographical memories of a young “Jimmy” Stewart. Stewart uses a roving close-third point of view (similar to the omniscient narrator of Virginia Woolf’s To the Lighthouse) to reveal the interior lives of each family member and elicit a sense of intimacy with each character. The novel is set primarily in 1992. We enter the story in Jim’s dilapidated car one January morning, then follow the rest of the family through the spring, summer, and fall seasons, ending at Christmas. We also dip back and forth in time to learn the backstories of Jim, his wife Connie, how they got together, and the race-related struggles the family has faced.
Each vignette depicts quaint singular moments of daily living, reading like the fuzzy footage of a family film, warmed and worn by memory. Each scene adds to the tapestry of this family’s life that year—when Jimmy and his brother Mason had just started elementary school, Shane and Nathan were in high school, and little Megan was still in diapers. The effect is like watching small clips captured on a home video recorder, one after the other. Similar to a motion picture, and how thousands of still photos viewed in succession create the impression of a moving piece, so too do these commonplace moments summate a moving representation of the lives of this mixed-race family living in middle-American suburbia.
Race is a central theme of the novel, but not race as an institutional construct or its impact on society. Defiant Acts truly homes in on the singular experience of this family’s life and experience of race in a predominantly white Midwest suburb. Connie’s boys experience bullying and endure racist remarks at school for having a “Black Daddy.” Jim experiences covert discrimination at work. Connie’s parents disown her for marrying one of “those people.” But in this novel, racial consequences remain local. It doesn’t seem that Jim would have gotten a better job had he been white. There is no exploration of whether Jim intentionally sought a white partner to “whitewash” his future children so that they might “pass” and avoid the racial discrimination he experienced (a core theme of novels like Maurice Carlos Ruffin’s We Cast a Shadow). There is also no exploration of how the broader world might treat Jim’s white stepsons differently than the mixed children once they grow up and become subjected to the racial constructs of the world. Defiant Acts remains isolated from the rest of the world. The real-world impact of these kinds of questions is not explored.
Class is also a topic that is not deeply explored. We see Jim and Connie scrape by. We hear her interior thoughts as she wonders if this is as successful as they will ever be. But nothing more is said to this end. The narrative focus remains on the tight-knit bond shared by this family—as though reverie alone would get them through.
As a reader, I wanted more, especially during a time when race politics seem to be undoing the work of the past sixty years. Our nation faces other issues too—the housing crisis, the shrinking of the middle class, the aging population, and questions surrounding the foundations of our very democracy. Stewart does not engage with these topics. Still, while I did want less separation between this family’s life and the modern world, it was pleasant to read a story that leaves you feeling warmed by the sweet memories of childhood—the sticky juice boxes, wrestling your siblings, and never having to worry about anything outside of your front door. Perhaps at a time when modern devices and news notifications ding and beep every millisecond, the world of this novel is a welcome quiet. Stewart’s refusal to engage with present-day politics may be intentional, to further drive home that though the world is falling apart, this family has one another, and that will ultimately be enough.
This is Stewart’s first novel, but chapters of the book have been previously published as short stories in literary journals such as Another Chicago Magazine, The Forge Literary Magazine, and Midwest Review. Stewart was also named to Newcity’s Lit 50 list for 2025, which recognizes influential writers in Chicago.
FICTION
Defiant Acts
By James Stewart III
Acre Books
Published May 17, 2025
