Breaking quite a dry spell, I read Nalo Hopkinson‘s Brown Girl in the Ring this past week. I did enjoy this book more than The Salt Roads, likely because it was more plot-driven. I didn’t love it; I would have liked to see more character development, and a thickening of the story. I enjoyed it as a quick read, however, I can imagine also enjoying a slower, deeper version of the same story.

I also found myself skimming through the more gory sections of the book, but this is probably a complaint peculiar to me and something that wouldn’t phase most readers my age. Call me a kook, but I’ve discovered that I just don’t enjoy blood, guts, and other kinds of gore. I can deal with violence that serves a narrative, and anything over my finely balanced measure of what counts as ‘serving the story’ will generally put me off a piece. I don’t like being scared gratuitously, and I don’t read books or watch films in the horror genre for that reason (my father could tell you about the time I started to watch Dr. Giggles with some friends, in an effort to defeat my fear of horror with sheer campiness, and how it backfired horribly and I called him to drive across town and follow me back home — I had the other car with me — so that I didn’t risk getting killed by a maniacal physician in the mile or so I had to travel…did I mention, in my car. Yeah. And, I was, like, 20 or something at this point. Not, you know, 12. The end. Postscript: just locating the Wikipedia entry has caused me to start to be totally jumpy in my cozy back room with three sides of windows. Definitely a night to keep my trusty Maglite near at hand. You can start laughing any time now…). Tangentially, this is the main issue I’m currently having with Heroes: I can’t stand the blood of the serial killing, and besides freaking me out, it seems completely unnecessary (both unnecessary to write the story that way, and unnecessary to show every single gruesome death on screen: we know what he does, our brains can slot in the first gory scene when necessary, thankyouverymuch). All the other issues I have with Heroes will have to wait for another time, as they really have no connection to the issues I had with Brown Girl in the Ring whatsoever. Also, the ways in which my struggle to stay engaged with Heroes is strikingly similar to the ambivalence that led me to stop watching Twin Peaks midway through the 2nd season (although, of course, I’ve since seen them all; on laserdisc, even)? Not relevant either.

Truthfully, I didn’t have many issues with Brown Girl in the Ring. It was ok. I didn’t love it, but it was entertaining and it was a nice break from continuing to work my way through Snow. Which I plan to finish and write about at some point.

This past week, I’ve read a light (that sounds better than ‘trashy’) trilogy of recent British historical fiction, by Penny Vincenzi, the Spoils of Time books that begin with No Angel. They read like a cross between Judith Krantz novels (lots of independent, rich women with glamourous jobs and handsome lovers and husbands) and The Thorn Birds or any number of Maeve Binchy novels (lots of affairs and friends who turn out to be untrustworthy and people marrying for money). As such, they were entertaining, and engrossing as even poorly written family sagas can turn out to be. These certainly weren’t poorly written, but they also didn’t rise either to the level of Krantz’s blithe and engaging trashiness or Binchy’s humorous and insightful characterizations.

To make another comparison with a contemporary British writer of historical fiction, Philippa Gregory, Vincenzi’s books were neither as good as Gregory’s novels of the Tudor court (that begin with The Other Boleyn Girl), nor as compellingly bad as her totally fabricated historical trilogy. They did fill the time, though, and as the story progressed I found myself wondering, especially in the second and third novels, whether the bad guys were ever going to succeed at their little games (they weren’t) and whether disaster was ever going to fail to be averted just in the nick of time (it wasn’t). In this last aspect, I found the novels peculiarly and comfortingly British, this love for the comedy (and sometimes tragedy) of timing, of near misses and fortuitous arrivals or departures that kept you, whether you liked it or not, on the edge of your seat. In only this way, the novels had a Wildean quality to them, and I was particularly reminded of An Ideal Husband, with its critical entrances and exits and the dramatic tension that’s built as a result. Besides the rather thin caricature of Wilde himself in the first novel, though, there really are no other grounds for comparison. Which is fine, as Vincenzi’s books are really not that kind of novel.

They are the kind of novel that you take to the beach, or on a train, or on a plane, and are glad to have around when you are holed up somewhere during a blizzard. They are long, they involve a whole array of feisty characters, and they manage to contain a lot of truth. It became almost a truism of the books that the women would stand up for themselves and not put up with any ‘claptrap’ from the men (that would be ‘sexism’), and it would all be for the best in the end: they would go on alone, the men would come around, or a new man made of stronger stuff would come along to fill the gap (the main characters were entirely heterosexual, with a few gay fashion photographers and the Wilde-esque professor thrown in on the edges). I enjoyed and appreciated this more feminist aspect, and I also appreciated the self-aware humor that cropped up periodically, in the form of comments made by the main characters about the kind of ‘back stairs housemaid novel’ that was very far from literature, but sold extremely well. The kind of novel that the reader could hardly object to, being totally engrossed in one at that very moment.

Black Girl / White Girl, by Joyce Carol Oates, has a lot of similarities to the book I read in December, The Last of Her Kind, by Sigrid Nunez. Both are first person narratives of well-meaning white girls in the 70s, each of whom felt responsible for the death of a black person and struggled to come to terms with their guilt and white privilege. Both novels also involved left-wing radicals, rich people repudiating their class, and someone going to prison.

This is the first book I’ve read by Oates, so I don’t have grounds to compare this novel to her others. Reading two such similar books in close proximity has also blurred the distinctions between them, and neither stands out as an amazing book. While Black Girl / White Girl discusses issues related to race, it doesn’t ‘deal with’ race in the way I expect from a sociological background. Mostly what it presents is the fumbling self-absorption of a white person who is invested in the image of ‘doing the right thing’ but completely lacking in knowledge or preparation to actually do so. Of course, it’s not clear what the right thing would be, and contemporary standards for the racial self-awareness of white college students may not be those of the time period which the book portrays. One element that did ring true was the dynamic in the dormitory after racial slurs appeared; I have heard the aftermath of these incidents described by my students, and the pattern is frequently the same as that described by Oates.

I would give this book a 6/10. It was well-written, but predictable, and only touched the surface of elements that I would likely have found more engaging. I would be interested to hear the reactions of people of Oate’s generation to the characterization. Perhaps in the context of that time the book presents the racial issues in a direct and challenging way.

The first book I’ve finished this year is Nalo Hopkinson‘s The Salt Roads. It was labeled (in some descriptions) as fantasy, but I would describe it more as historical and/or speculative fiction.

A friend whom I admire greatly is a fan of Hopkinson’s, which is what led me to pick up this book. In the end, I appreciated it, but I can’t say that I loved it. The book is structured around three distinct narratives, in three distinct time periods and locations, connected by the ‘fantasy’ aspect, the voice of a goddess. I certainly didn’t dislike it, however I didn’t find any of the three main narratives compelling. I did become more engaged toward the end of the novel, when the linking narrative of the goddess builds to a tension point. In the end, though, the book simply ends, with very little to indicate why these people or these portions of life narrative were made to constitute the story. This element is why I would classify this book more as historical fiction: the selection of the characters seems to have been made along lines of historical interest, and the characters themselves never come fully alive in their own right. So, it is interesting in the abstract to read of Baudelaire’s mistress, a slave midwife in the prelude to the Haitian uprisings, and the myth of an Egyptian saint in the 4th century, but I struggled to move beyond an historical interest in their futures.

Nalo Hopkinson is compared to Edwidge Danticat, who writes historical fiction of Haiti as well, and to Toni Morrison. Personally, I greatly prefer Danticat’s historical fiction set in Haiti; I find it much more alive, and Krik? Krak! is one of my favorite short story collections. In fact, I can credit that book with opening me up to the possibility of enjoying short story collections in general.

I’ll certainly read more of Hopkinson, though; perhaps one of her earlier books will grab me more. This particular one I’d give a 7/10.