Novelist, playwright and essayist Darryl Pinckney has observed that when he was young, gay images in media were either “camp, coded, high-brow or late-night.” Jed Goodfinch, the protagonist in Mr. Pinckney’s second novel, “Black Deutschland,” embodies none of these things. Jed’s desire is raw, serious and uncensored. Even more palpable and persistent is Jed’s loneliness. As the novel opens, he is in his 20s, a recovering alcoholic and drug addict, and the son of an upper-middle-class black family in Chicago. He vows:

“I may have fallen apart in the city of my birth, but the city of my rebirth would see me put back together again. ... What had not happened in Chicago would finally happen in Berlin, the city that owed me and loved my fantasies. ... I was inordinately proud of my one-way ticket. I’d become that person I so admired, the black American expatriate.” It’s the early 1980s, and the specter of AIDS haunts both continents. But Christopher Isherwood’s “The Berlin Stories,” set in the decadent last years of pre-Nazi Germany, fuels Jed’s confidence. He is determined to find romance somewhere among the “white boys who wanted to atone for Germany’s crimes by loving a black boy like me.”

In Berlin, Jed is reunited with his cousin Cello, a brilliant concert pianist with stage fright who has married into a bourgeois German family. Growing up, Cello’s parents had neglected her and her siblings, leaving them mostly to the care of Jed’s parents. Jed’s mother groomed Cello to be a “Negro Achiever ... a species of secular saint. To be young, gifted and black, Nina Simone sings.” Jed and Cello seemingly represent opposing outcomes in their family’s Talented Tenth strivings. But the cousins’ attitudes toward black identity and white acceptance are more similar than Cello would admit, so she keeps Jed at a cold, sometimes cruel, distance.

“Black Deutschland” travels back and forth in time and place, covering Jed’s childhood and adolescence, his adventures in Berlin, and intermittent trips back home to Chicago. Sometimes these shifts, mirroring Jed’s thoughts, happen in the same paragraph. The result is a rare intimacy with the main character that, surprisingly, does not exhaust the reader.

Through characters in the novel’s Chicago scenes, Mr. Pinckney hilariously shatters the amber of perfection in which we often preserve our civil rights-era elders. Here, they are incompetent, homophobic, narcissistic, duplicitous — and yet Jed is outcast as his family’s singular screw-up.

Jed would be justified in calling out this hypocrisy, especially that of cousin Cello. Instead, he keeps his observations to himself. Jed doesn’t delight in the failure of others. He’s more concerned with his sobriety. He steers clear of white wine, his former mistress, but partakes of hashish — and the changing social tide in Berlin as the Wall is on the verge of coming down.

In the latter pages of “Black Deutschland,” Mr. Pinckney references “Dark Princess,” a 1928 novel by W.E.B. Du Bois. That same year, The New York Times ran a review of the book, oddly titled, “Race Discrimination.” The review chided Du Bois for writing about social injustices and “miscegenation.” He should instead, the review urged, use his talents to write noble black characters to sway “those who believe in the preservation of racial purity.” Nearly a century later, Jed Goodfinch arrives on the scene, no one’s definition of noble. Through Jed and in “Black Deutschland” as a whole, Mr. Pinckney defies limiting notions about who, what and how black writers are to write.

Darryl Pinckney’s narrative is both subtle and extraordinarily detailed, at once raucous and elegiac. A mournfulness hovers over nearly every page, but Jed is not to be pitied. However tragic, he is nevertheless self-determining and free.

Deesha Philyaw, a writer living in Forest Hills, is co-author of “Co-Parenting 101: Helping Your Kids Thrive in Two Households After Divorce.”

First Published: March 20, 2016, 4:00 a.m.