Archive for May 2011
Joyce Carol Oates: Black Girl/White Girl
I once temped in an office with a very thin woman who liked to bake cakes. She would bring them in to work and watch us all tuck in, a strange glint in her eye. One day she asked me to proofread a letter to her soon-to-be ex-husband’s solicitor for her as she wasn’t used to writing much. I was happy to help. I took the letter off for my lunch break and settled down to read it in the staff common room.
And then I got a shock: the thing was mad, rambling, filled with half-formulated accusations and vague threats. I could hardly make any sense of it.
If I’d been a bit older and known her better, I would have told her not to send it, or, better, offered her the chance to talk about the things that were clearly upsetting her. But I was just out of university — still young enough to think that age makes a difference — and none too sure how the adult world really worked. Perhaps this really was the sort of letter people sent to their partners’ solicitors? Maybe my misgivings were just a sign of my immaturity? Besides, it wasn’t my place to tell her what she should and shouldn’t do.
So, rather than say anything, I corrected the typos, made a few mumbling suggestions for toning down some of the more outlandish phrases, and handed the letter back.
I’d forgotten about that letter until I started on Black Girl/White Girl, the 45th novel (counting those written under synonyms) from the extraordinarily prolific American writer Joyce Carol Oates. In it, I found a parable of the dangers of being straitjacketed by such misplaced principles, naivety, guilt and fear.
Looking back on events in 1975 from the vantage point of 1990, the book recalls Genna Meade’s traumatic, abortive first year at a prestigious women’s college on the east coast. The daughter of Mad Max Meade, a radical human rights lawyer-cum-activist, and the descendant of the wealthy Quakers who founded the college, Genna starts the year full of high-minded ideas and anxious to break down the barriers that she fears her famous connections may place between her and the other students. When she discovers she has Minette Swift, a black pentecostal minister’s daughter, for a roommate, she is keen to befriend the awkward girl, particularly when she seems to become the target of racial abuse.
But as the year progresses and her so-called friend’s behaviour becomes more and more erratic, Genna’s rational mind and her ideals go to war with one another. Presented with evidence that the persecution her roommate is experiencing may not be all that it seems and that the girl is becoming increasingly mentally unstable, Genna is unable to overcome her consciousness of the historical burden of racial discrimination and what might nowadays be called ‘political correctness’ to challenge Minette and, perhaps, get her the help she needs — with tragic results.
Oates has been criticised for the rapidity with which she churns novels out by readers who feel that the rate she works at sometimes leaves her little scope to develop ideas and connections. Here, however, the breathless, sometimes fragmentary quality of the narrative, which is styled as an unpublished manuscript written by Genna, now Generva, Meade fits the subject matter beautifully. We can imagine Generva stumbling out of bed early in the morning and sitting blearily at her desk, as she tells us towards the end that she has been doing, to get down the recollections and impressions that plague her.
For my part, I couldn’t help wishing Oates had written the book sooner.
About a year after I left that temp job, I heard that the woman who used to make the cakes had killed herself. While it’s useless to hash over might-have-beens and if-onlies — and a kind of arrogance to assume that we have the power to alter another’s actions and choices on such a profound level — I can’t help thinking that if I’d read Black Girl/White Girl before I met her I might have had the courage to try.
Picture by Su-lin
Emma Donoghue: Room
This was a book that kept jumping out at me. From a colleague’s desk, in conversations with friends, on posters, on the tube. I’d actually been running away from it for a good couple of months when it finally snared me on my maiden trawl through the Kindle’s bestseller chart.
The reason I’d been running away was my hatred of misery memoirs. I can’t stand them. They are the sweet chilli chicken dippers of the book world: all processed flavours and cheap flesh, with next-to-no substance to them.
So a novel inspired by the ordeal of Elisabeth Fritzl, the Austrian woman imprisoned for 24 years and repeatedly impregnated by her father, was not calculated to have me champing at the bit. It was probably only a combination of a glass of wine and a nagging doubt of my ability to navigate myself to a book I actually wanted to read on the Kindle (it takes me a while to work these things out – I still file paper tax returns) that clinched it.
And I have to say I’m glad. Because, instead of the lurid, titillating sensationalism-fest I’d been fearing, I found a skillful exploration of childhood and personhood and what it means to live in the world.
Donoghue has played down the Fritzl link in interviews about the book, but she’s on a bit of a hiding to nothing with this. In the plot alone, it’s there for all to see.
Like Elisabeth, Ma and Jack have been kept in a specially constructed, sound-proofed dungeon since before Jack was born. Cut off from reality, they must make a game out of a nightmare, relying on their own resourcefulness, the people ‘in TV’ and the food and ‘Sunday treats’ brought by their captor Old Nick (when he remembers) to stay alive and sane.
So far, so Fritzl (except that, as far as we can tell, Old Nick is no relation), but as Jack, the book’s narrator, turns five, his long-suffering Ma, who was abducted when she was just 19, reaches breaking point. Conscious of her son’s need for more than their 11 by 11 metre cell can offer and the fact that Old Nick is running out of money to provide for them, she devises a strategy to get them out once and for all, a strategy that relies on Jack’s ability to play dead.
Alright, so the escape for Elisabeth was a lot longer coming, and came out of one of her children’s genuine illnesses, but the bare bones are pretty identical. Where the two stories differ, however (and the thing that probably makes Donoghue squeamish about the comparison), is that while Elisabeth’s was told in the glare of the world’s media with every salacious detail and horrifying aspect picked over and commented upon, Jack and Ma’s is told carefully, thoughtfully, from the inside.
Sensational though the subject matter is, Donoghue refuses to sacrifice truth and insight for cheap thrills. In fact, she chooses to sidestep the greatest opportunity for stake-raising altogether, having Jack leap out of Old Nick’s truck only a few streets away from his home, so that it is easy for the police to trace the whereabouts of Room and Ma.
A writer with different priorities would have prolonged this section, getting Jack more thoroughly lost and leaving Ma to the mercy of her duped captor to capitalise on the tension. But Donoghue isn’t interested in this. What she is interested in, as becomes apparent as the second half of the book unfolds, is the rare opportunity that the situation provides to parachute a fully formed human alien into the world and observe it from the outside.
Never having been exposed to the ‘real’ world, Jack is able to look at it afresh and highlight the strangeness of the things we take for granted, from stairs to shopping malls. Occasionally, this takes on a grating, Kids-say-the-funniest-things quality, but for the most part it’s very well handled.
So much so that, before I’d even fully reconciled myself to what I was reading, I was clicking on to the last page.
Picture by weegeebored