Reading Wednesday
Jul. 10th, 2019 07:34 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
troisoiseauxLast month, I read and really enjoyed Nigerian-British author Helen Oyeyemi’s new novel, Gingerbread, so I decided to check out her other books, starting with Boy, Snow, Bird. It’s a loose retelling of Snow White, set in mid-20th century Massachusetts; the Snow White connection mainly comes up in the form of magic mirrors and jealous step-mothers, but even these concepts aren’t used in the way that “Snow White retelling” would make you think.
I have no idea how to describe the plot or discuss my reaction to this book without major spoilers, so proceed with caution:
In the early 1950s, a young white woman, Boy Novak, flees her abusive single father in Lower East Side New York for a quiet town in Massachusetts, where she meets Arturo Whitman, an academic turned jewelry-maker and a widower with a young daughter, Snow. Boy and Arturo eventually marry, but the birth of their first daughter, Bird, reveals a carefully kept Whitman family secret: they are not white, but white-passing African-Americans. (Snow, whose mother was also white-passing, is fair-skinned and blonde; Bird is visibly of African-American descent.) Arturo’s sister, Clara, offers to raise Bird – the only one of her siblings unable to pass as white, she had been sent away as a child herself, to cover up the family’s secret – but Boy, frustrated at the way her reputation-obsessed mother-in-law and the town in general dote on Snow while shunning Bird, ends up sending Snow to live with her instead.
As a young teenager in the late 1960s, Bird reconnects with her estranged half-sister; their correspondence leads to a family reunion where various skeletons come tumbling out of their family’s closet.
When I read Gingerbread, I found myself almost hypnotized by Oyeyemi’s writing, following her sentences like watching a magician shuffle cards or cups for his next trick, with the result that I felt weirdly zen about even the more disturbing aspects of the story. Reading Boy, Snow, Bird, on the other hand, I felt unsettled even when things seemed to be going okay, because there was just this overall sense of waiting for the other shoe to drop. It does, in a couple of places, but I feel like most of them didn’t. They just hovered, unresolved, and a week later I’m still nervously peeking upwards to make sure that I won’t get unexpectedly brained by stray footwear.
Unfortunately, one of the few mysteries that actually did get resolved, completely ruined my ability to enjoy the book.
I wasn’t thrilled with where the novel went regarding Boy’s father, specifically the reveal that – to use the in-story language – he was actually her mother. Like, the big reveal that Boy’s abusive father was actually a lesbian woman who conceived Boy after being raped and began living as a man in response to her trauma is very “now, we don’t have time to unpack all that” in itself,* but I was especially uncomfortable with the way that his shifting gender identity is described as, like, possession, like being possessed, and the novel ends with Boy, Snow, Bird, and a family friend driving to New York with hopes of “waking up” the woman inside of him. Yikes, yikes, a thousand times yikes.
* Actually, this was a thing that came up in Women Talking, as well? The “AFAB person reacting to sexual trauma by presenting and/or identifying as male” thing, I mean. Which I don’t feel particularly qualified to have an opinion on, either way, but I will point out that said character in Women Talking a. is trusted to take care of the community’s children, and b. has their new name respected by the titular women, even though they live in a community so conservative that a male character is considered effeminate for not knowing how to farm. In Boy, Snow, Bird, on the other hand, the novel’s one (1) LGBT character is an abusive sociopath who acts violently towards children on multiple occasions. It’s not great!
(I think I’m especially disturbed/upset by this because Gingerbread had a number of casually LGBT characters, and a really sweet lesbian romance. Like, I trusted her. Maybe it’s a case of an author learning from earlier mistakes? Which is an overall positive, but jarring to experience in reverse.)
I also read The Body in Question by Jill Ciment. The one-sentence summary of the plot is that a middle-aged woman has an affair with a younger man while they’re both sequestered jurists for the trial of an autistic teenage girl accused of murder. The one-sentence summary of my thoughts on this is that it was awfully irresponsible of them, and I don’t think the girl did it. It was a short read – I finished it in one evening – but somehow still felt like it dragged on longer than it needed to. There was a moment where I thought the story was going to take a turn for the interestingly bizarre and the woman was going to end up being accused of murder herself, but it did not.
Aaaand I finally got around to finishing The Edwardians, by Vita Sackville-West. Published in 1930 with the intriguing disclaimer that no character in it is wholly fictional, it’s part bildungsroman, part social commentary on the superficiality and, ultimately, unsustainability of the English aristocracy’s way of life at the turn of the 20th century.
Honestly, my main takeaway is that I’m now 2/2 on the theory that if you’re an aristocratic young man named Sebastian in an English novel written in the first half of the 20th century, you’re probably gay and definitely depressed. Most of The Edwardians focuses on Sebastian’s affairs with women of varying social classes, but considering that all of these relationships are unfulfilling at best and emotionally destructive at worst, and the book ultimately ends with Sebastian running off with the arctic explorer whose chance encounter earlier in the novel kicks off a five-year existential crisis, rather than marrying the boring girl who symbolizes his surrender to social expectations... I think he can be easily read as gay/bisexual but extremely repressed about it.
There’s also an entire subplot that happens off-page, but would have made an interesting novel in itself: Sebastian’s sister Viola (I know) and the aforementioned arctic explorer fall in love via letters, and she makes her decision between independence/‘real life’ and the double-edged sword of wealth & privilege ft. stifling social expectations sooner and with more confidence than her brother, despite or perhaps because of the more stringent expectations placed on her as an upper-class woman. Sebastian has more wiggle room for his behavior – his affairs and partying are not just indulged but expected, as long as he keeps a veneer of respectability – but Viola... if she’s going to be damned for a penny, might as well go in for a pound, eh?
I have no idea how to describe the plot or discuss my reaction to this book without major spoilers, so proceed with caution:
In the early 1950s, a young white woman, Boy Novak, flees her abusive single father in Lower East Side New York for a quiet town in Massachusetts, where she meets Arturo Whitman, an academic turned jewelry-maker and a widower with a young daughter, Snow. Boy and Arturo eventually marry, but the birth of their first daughter, Bird, reveals a carefully kept Whitman family secret: they are not white, but white-passing African-Americans. (Snow, whose mother was also white-passing, is fair-skinned and blonde; Bird is visibly of African-American descent.) Arturo’s sister, Clara, offers to raise Bird – the only one of her siblings unable to pass as white, she had been sent away as a child herself, to cover up the family’s secret – but Boy, frustrated at the way her reputation-obsessed mother-in-law and the town in general dote on Snow while shunning Bird, ends up sending Snow to live with her instead.
As a young teenager in the late 1960s, Bird reconnects with her estranged half-sister; their correspondence leads to a family reunion where various skeletons come tumbling out of their family’s closet.
When I read Gingerbread, I found myself almost hypnotized by Oyeyemi’s writing, following her sentences like watching a magician shuffle cards or cups for his next trick, with the result that I felt weirdly zen about even the more disturbing aspects of the story. Reading Boy, Snow, Bird, on the other hand, I felt unsettled even when things seemed to be going okay, because there was just this overall sense of waiting for the other shoe to drop. It does, in a couple of places, but I feel like most of them didn’t. They just hovered, unresolved, and a week later I’m still nervously peeking upwards to make sure that I won’t get unexpectedly brained by stray footwear.
Unfortunately, one of the few mysteries that actually did get resolved, completely ruined my ability to enjoy the book.
I wasn’t thrilled with where the novel went regarding Boy’s father, specifically the reveal that – to use the in-story language – he was actually her mother. Like, the big reveal that Boy’s abusive father was actually a lesbian woman who conceived Boy after being raped and began living as a man in response to her trauma is very “now, we don’t have time to unpack all that” in itself,* but I was especially uncomfortable with the way that his shifting gender identity is described as, like, possession, like being possessed, and the novel ends with Boy, Snow, Bird, and a family friend driving to New York with hopes of “waking up” the woman inside of him. Yikes, yikes, a thousand times yikes.
* Actually, this was a thing that came up in Women Talking, as well? The “AFAB person reacting to sexual trauma by presenting and/or identifying as male” thing, I mean. Which I don’t feel particularly qualified to have an opinion on, either way, but I will point out that said character in Women Talking a. is trusted to take care of the community’s children, and b. has their new name respected by the titular women, even though they live in a community so conservative that a male character is considered effeminate for not knowing how to farm. In Boy, Snow, Bird, on the other hand, the novel’s one (1) LGBT character is an abusive sociopath who acts violently towards children on multiple occasions. It’s not great!
(I think I’m especially disturbed/upset by this because Gingerbread had a number of casually LGBT characters, and a really sweet lesbian romance. Like, I trusted her. Maybe it’s a case of an author learning from earlier mistakes? Which is an overall positive, but jarring to experience in reverse.)
I also read The Body in Question by Jill Ciment. The one-sentence summary of the plot is that a middle-aged woman has an affair with a younger man while they’re both sequestered jurists for the trial of an autistic teenage girl accused of murder. The one-sentence summary of my thoughts on this is that it was awfully irresponsible of them, and I don’t think the girl did it. It was a short read – I finished it in one evening – but somehow still felt like it dragged on longer than it needed to. There was a moment where I thought the story was going to take a turn for the interestingly bizarre and the woman was going to end up being accused of murder herself, but it did not.
Aaaand I finally got around to finishing The Edwardians, by Vita Sackville-West. Published in 1930 with the intriguing disclaimer that no character in it is wholly fictional, it’s part bildungsroman, part social commentary on the superficiality and, ultimately, unsustainability of the English aristocracy’s way of life at the turn of the 20th century.
Honestly, my main takeaway is that I’m now 2/2 on the theory that if you’re an aristocratic young man named Sebastian in an English novel written in the first half of the 20th century, you’re probably gay and definitely depressed. Most of The Edwardians focuses on Sebastian’s affairs with women of varying social classes, but considering that all of these relationships are unfulfilling at best and emotionally destructive at worst, and the book ultimately ends with Sebastian running off with the arctic explorer whose chance encounter earlier in the novel kicks off a five-year existential crisis, rather than marrying the boring girl who symbolizes his surrender to social expectations... I think he can be easily read as gay/bisexual but extremely repressed about it.
There’s also an entire subplot that happens off-page, but would have made an interesting novel in itself: Sebastian’s sister Viola (I know) and the aforementioned arctic explorer fall in love via letters, and she makes her decision between independence/‘real life’ and the double-edged sword of wealth & privilege ft. stifling social expectations sooner and with more confidence than her brother, despite or perhaps because of the more stringent expectations placed on her as an upper-class woman. Sebastian has more wiggle room for his behavior – his affairs and partying are not just indulged but expected, as long as he keeps a veneer of respectability – but Viola... if she’s going to be damned for a penny, might as well go in for a pound, eh?
no subject
Date: 2019-07-10 07:08 pm (UTC)Ack, what.
I understand how you could get gender-passing in a novel about race-passing, especially a novel based on a fairy tale about destructive step/mothers and daughters, but I would still have felt very badly bitten by that reveal if I had encountered it in situ. Honestly I'm not thrilled in summary. [edit] More significantly, I managed to forget this twist having been told about it by another friend's review five years ago, which suggests that I really did not want to deal with this book.
no subject
Date: 2019-07-12 03:11 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2019-07-12 03:51 am (UTC)It's an upsetting outcome! Even beyond the only-queer-character-is-a-terrible-person problem, the spell/possession aspect described by both you and
(Also, the more I think about it, the more that race-passing and gender-passing don't quite seem appropriate to present as the same thing in the first place...?)
I don't think they are interchangeable. (I can imagine a different book saying something about the ways in which they are not.)