I was looking for an absorbing and fun book to celebrate the end of the semester, so I tore right through this. It’s an odd novel, one that’s weaving together three major strands through the story of one character, a graduate student who is on the verge of getting married and also trying to finish her dissertation. The first, probably most compelling strand, is a reflection on multi-racial identity and Blackness; the second, the central plot, is a meditation on marriage via a thriller-ish narrative about becoming sexually obsessed with a stranger who calls your seemingly blissful relationship into question; and the third is the dissertation topic — the Jonestown massacre. It didn’t quite come together for me, I think because I was so much more interested in all the parts that weren’t the sexual temptation plot?
I was curious how people had responded to the novel, because I imagine that various aspects of the way its narrator discusses race raised some hackles, so I poked around online, and found this interview with the author, which had this quote that I really liked:
I’m often asked, Are you going to write about a character who’s not biracial? And I wonder if Richard Ford is ever asked, Are you not going to write about a straight white man again? To me the biracial female is the universal perspective. I could write about it a hundred times.
Someone online complained that whereas the main character was complex and nuanced, the other characters seemed sort of flat, but I think that was the point — that the central protagonist, the only one whose mind we had access to, saw everyone else that way. Of course, you might object that this is unrealistic; no one is so callous and calculating, etc, and sure. But I think it’s part of how the narrator cultivates an unlikeable character — this is a way of making it (subtly) clear that we are not meant to fully identify with her perspective. The fact that other characters notice, and repeatedly object, to her indifference, seems very intentional to me; like a way of signalling to us that maybe she is the problem…
Kasia Reads 