Nightcrawling by Leila Mottley review a dazzling debut

This chilling tale of power and corruption, based on a true crime involving brutality in the Oakland police department, announces a bold new voice

When asked how to write in a world dominated by a white culture, Toni Morrison once responded: “By trying to alter language, simply to free it up, not to repress or confine it … Tease it. Blast its racist straitjacket.” At a time when structural imbalances of capital, health, gender and race deepen divides, the young American Leila Mottley’s debut novel is a searing testament to the liberated spirit and explosive ingenuity of such storytelling.

Based on a true crime in 2015 involving institutional exploitation, brutality and corruption in the Oakland police department, Nightcrawling gives voice to 17-year-old Kiara Johnson, who, after her father’s death and mother’s detention in a rehab facility, becomes a sex worker to pay for rent hikes. She also needs to look after her disillusioned older brother Marcus, who spends his time on music, and Trevor, a nine-year-old left behind by a neighbour. Drugs, sex and power struggles are a familiar premise from television dramas such as The Wire. What makes Nightcrawling scarring and unforgettable as a novel is Mottley’s ability to change our language about and perception of the repressed and confined. She does this by entering the mind, body and soul of Kiara, one of the toughest and kindest young heroines of our time.

“Strut, fly, gallop,” Kiara tells us. “There are so many ways to walk a street, but none of them will make you bulletproof.” In Nightcrawling, dangers loom brighter than streetlights, but there is also something freeing in the way Mottley writes about Kiara walking the streets after dark. It’s as if the teenager somehow has to learn a new voice, rhythm and language: “I’m shuffling and skipping and trying to warm hands in a sky that only breeds cold and real quick my heel snaps off the sole of shoes I stole from Salvation Army and sidewalk meets cheek. Stings. Glass inside the cut. Blood spill. Blood clot. Voice.”

From the messy yet intimate domestic interiors of Kiara’s apartment to the seedy Oakland streets studded by potholes, Mottley creates a broken world in which reality reads like exuberant satire. Although Kiara’s streets often witness funeral processions, they’re also buzzing with life, skateboards, graffiti, well-spiced food and good friends – who can’t protect her. “Night crawling up to me when the sun’s out,” Kiara murmurs to herself. What she can’t tell her closest friend is how often the cops ring her up, invite her to sex parties without paying her afterwards, and threaten to put her brother in jail if she exposes their arrangements.

Fiction needs both order and chaos. Mottley handles the chaos outside and inside Kiara with a quiet, cool elegance that is entirely unjudgmental. This is a difficult feat, particularly when all eyes around Kiara – those of family, friends, police officers turned clients, and finally a grand jury – focus fiercely on her throughout, making demands on her time, body, money and capacity for forgiveness. Meanwhile, she struggles to give her account of the devastating truth of her life. If opportunity and choice are the stuff American dreams are made of, they are sources of nightmare for someone who has been exploited and smeared by those in power, feeling that life is choiceless and unsurvivable.

Nevertheless, it is exactly its commitment to the art and ethics of survival that makes Nightcrawling a rare and compelling meditation on the powerless. The blazing candour of Motley’s art unpacks Kiara’s complex psychology, youth and edgy intelligence as well as showing her unflinching maternal instinct to protect Marcus and Trevor at all costs. Ethics lie at the heart of Mottley’s detailed survey of Kiara’s dreadful predicament: whether to expose the police or keep her mouth shut. Nightcrawling allows grounds for every impossible decision she must make, examining her moral compass as consequences unfold around her and build to a chilling grand jury scene. Kiara is reminded by her ambitious white lawyer about the power of the spoken word: “The only thing you have control over is what you say … If you tell the truth, then we have a chance at an indictment and changing the way this kind of thing works.” Nightcrawling is not only a fearless investigation of justice, guilt and prejudice, but an allegory of the potential power of speech, narrative and fiction itself.

In a novel where racism is everywhere, Mottley uses anonymity to chilling effect. The police officers are referred to by their badge numbers – 612, 190, 601. Their names are disclosed only towards the very end. But against the insidious hidden forces of institutional and social corruption, Mottley sings the inner experiences of the body: “The things your body needs most don’t usually make sense”; “Sex feels no different from an insistent punch to my gut”; “I exited that courtroom with a different body”. Restlessly truth-seeking, Nightcrawling marks the dazzling arrival of a young writer with a voice and vision you won’t easily get out of your head.

Kit Fan’s novel Diamond Hill is published by Dialogue. Nightcrawling is published by Bloomsbury (£16.99). To support the Guardian and Observer order your copy at guardianbookshop.com. Delivery charges may apply

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