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.