A stranger in a strange land, Afro-haired, brown skinned Uly has come back to the small West Indies Island where he was raised. He’s a homeboy with a past. Revisiting his old haunts – the tourist beaches where he used to work, the golf courses where he and his friends hung out – Uly looks back on his 20-odd years and sees, mostly, a chronicle of screw-ups.

The booze didn’t help, and there were never any strong family ties. Only a few moments of the good life ever came Uly’s way, and most of these involved women or books – literature was the only thing that really mattered. The rest of his time was spent bouncing from country to country without connecting to anyone. And there’s something else: Uly has killed three people. The first murder was a mess – a confusing quasi-accident. The second two were deliberate.

Uly starts with the spectacularly boring island culture that shaped him, exacerbating his need to roam: “Eventually crystal blue waters, velvety white sands, and tropical fragrant breezes all shrink to nothing more than background regularity.” Uly and his few friends run around the island crashing golf carts and getting high. Uly loves books and bookstores, though, and his studies finally land him in an American school. The shock is huge. Eventually Uly – Ulysses on a perilous journey – moves to a college in Georgia and becomes “…determined to fit in with middle class Black America.” His plan doesn’t quite work.

More like a piece of music than a novel, Roam is brief and written in rhythmic, open-ended riffs and anecdotes. The killings are deliberately underplayed – they receive as much weight in the narrative as Uly’s preoccupation with libraries or his longstanding attempts to stop drinking. The book’s style is effective, but the content taxes one’s patience. Many readers will tire of Mr. Untogether before the novel ends. Uly is pretty easy on himself, and his adventures are a bit too selective (where does this man get money?). Roam’s cover design displays an out-of-focus nude black man with a target on his head, making the novel look like some sort of odd public health pamphlet instead of a short but promising literary debut.