See you, 2022
Hey All,
It has been a year -- and I don't mean a year since my last message in this space -- I mean 2022. What a year. Covid continues but masks are history. Like many of you, I'm sporting a bunch of new needle holes and I leak when I drink water, like in a cartoon. The north pole has become the wobbly Polar Vortex.
This past autumn, I read a bunch of novels as a screener for a national contest, about a half dozen of which stayed with me after the fact, and two of which continue to be on my mind long afterward, which is what every novelist hopes will happen. So that's what this missive will be about, the two that really stuck, and why I think they did. That's the part that should appeal to novelists and the rest is general interest. Ready? Here we go.
An Ordinary Wonder by Buki Papillon is the upbeat story of an intersex woman from Nigeria who is coming of age in a culture that still lacks a frame of reference for dealing with non-binary, transgender, queer, and intersex people. Some still-developing nations of the world are just now reaching the point where they must finally start to directly deal with bigotry and hate against their LGBTQIA+ citizens.
The book's hero, Oto, has been forced to grow up male but actually has the genitalia of a woman with some male qualities mixed in. Unfortunately, when she was born, her mother really needed a son, so that's who and what she was told she was. That's one sort of travesty the book deals with. Another is Oto's mother's belief in witchcraft. Her adherence to the old folk beliefs allows her to think that Oto's difference is the result of a curse put on her for being the concubine of a powerful, wealthy man -- a man who will not acknowledge Oto's existence or problems. Oto wants someone to acknowledge her femaleness and to transition to living as a woman. But the only support for doing so is coming from the healthcare workers in her life like the school nurse who has seen intersex genitals like Oto's on several other occasions. She knows what Oto faces in trying to come out as intersex in Nigeria with a mother who is alive in the modern era but won't even come to terms with queerness.
The book is fairly elementary in its dealings with subjects now quite familiar to Western readers. It treats the material as though we are a little like Oto's mother. That is, the writer seems to assume we are encountering these situations for the first time and, like Oto's mother, we may not yet be comfortable with this new reality of intersex, queer and transgender people living out in the open. The plot and events of the action are not surprising, either: Oto is seen experimenting with female dress. Oto is shown dealing with her heteronormative feelings of attraction to boys and men. Oto is faced with the bigoted and anti-gay harassment of a male classmate and narrowly escapes being raped. The course of the story is as expected as Oto attempts to do the impossible thing we are now accustomed to seeing in LGBT storytelling which is the transgression of every social norm and expectation in order to force people to accept who she is. Oto also manages to go against most of the close members of her family and community and make a clean break not only with them but also her country of origin.
In fact, she will leave everything behind and fly off to attend college in the US. This is all very positive. In fact, it's so positive, it probably should not work. The reason it does is that the writer knows this is what most readers want. We want it not only for Oto but for anyone and everyone who has ever found themselves in the impossible circumstance of not being able to satisfy a single one of the world's expectations and who realizes they are failing everyone around them on almost every level. The book doesn't go into how Oto manages to do this, but we are so relieved that she can do it we're willing to suspend our disbelief.
In other words, the writer manages to pull out a win by doing what often works when nothing else will: Give the reader the ending they were hoping for.
The Trees by Percival Everett: Like its title, this one is a puzzler at first. What about the trees? And why are we starting out in the company of some white southern characters living in Money, Mississippi, a bunch who are so broadly comical it's soon evident that the writer doesn't mind if we find their crudeness and ignorance offensive to the point of cartoonish implausibility? Things then take a strange turn when one of the adult male members of the family is murdered in very strange circumstances while in the bathroom just a feet away from the other characters.
The murder is violent and gory and, apparently, the murderer is still in the bathroom with the body! The apparent murderer is a black man and he too is dead. The highest unlikelihood here is that they somehow did each other in with their bare hands, in a tiny bathroom, with other family members nearby. Yet nobody saw or heard anything. It gets stranger. It will turn out that the so-called perpetrator is the victim of a hate crime who has been dead and residing unclaimed in a morgue for some time. It will also turn out that the victim is a member of the Carolyn Bryant family. Meaning that the white characters are relatives of THAT Carolyn Bryant, the woman who made an accusation against a 14-year-old boy named Emmett Till (that he whistled at her) that ended in his abduction, torture, and lynching in Money, Mississippi, in 1955.
So who was the black man found with the body? And how could he have killed a Bryant family member when he is already dead and had been lying for weeks in a morgue? That is until his body mysteriously disappeared and turned up at this murder scene. Everett makes no attempt to explain. While two black detectives from the state bureau of investigation named Ed Morgan and Jim Davis try to puzzle this out, the man's body disappears from another morgue -- again -- and turns up at another homicide of another white character with a connection to the Bryants. The book is part police procedural and part supernatural horror film script. But more than anything, it is post-modern.
Because Everett doesn't care whether we truly believe in any of the characters, or the action, or the plot, or the dialogue. He just wants to write a book we'll finish about the fact that, within our collective memory as a society, a group of grown men tortured then murdered a 14-year-old boy for no good reason and nobody went to jail for it. This is another book that works on a premise that has ample reason not to succeed -- and yet it does. In the process, it demonstrates that, 67 years later, the simple fact of a little boy's needless murder is such a powerful and enduring tragedy that it can carry a book almost without regard to how that book has been written or plotted.
Books on my radar for 2023
The Female Man by Joanna Russ (1975): This is a speculative novel about four women living in different realities who get thrown together. One reality is like the Great Depression, one is like 1970s America, one is located on an all-female planet called Whileaway, and in one a shooting war is raging between men and women.
Season of the Witch by Jean Marie Stine (1968): This is about a man who rapes and murders a woman in a post-apocalyptic future. Instead of execution, they place his brain into his victim's body.
The Journal of Julius Rodman by Edgar Allan Poe (1840): Oddly, this is Poe's unfinished serialized fictional account of the first expedition across the Rocky Mountains, which is what Lewis & Clark accomplished in 1804. The journal chronicles a 1792 expedition led by an explorer named Julius Rodman up the Missouri River to the Northwest, effectively scooping Thomas Jefferson and Lewis & Clark.
A Molecule Away from Madness: Tales from the Hijacked Brain by Sara Manning Peskin (2022): This book is about the proteins that abound in every cell of our bodies which, when located in the brain, serve as the building blocks of our personalities and relationships. Sometimes, the balance of these proteins gets so far off, it can be like a literal hijacking of our minds by a sort of terrorist living inside us.
Daddy-Long-Legs by Jean Webster (1912): In this epistolary YA book, resurrected from the early 20th century, Jerusha Abbott, an eighteen-year-old girl is an orphan with a mysterious millionaire benefactor who she can't contact or ever meet.
This month, I’m recommending: Moonage Daydream because it shows what a revelation Bowie was when he burst onto the scene in the 60s. His look and sound were and still are like nobody else’s and he was openly androgynous and nonbinary at a time when nobody else was. What he was doing from the start would later be seen and heard in the work of artists as varied as Blondie, Richard O’Brien (Rocky Horror Picture Show), Rod Stewart, Leigh Bowery and Prince.
For any new readers: My new novel, Tania the Revolutionary, is available on Amazon for Kindle and paperback or Barnes & Noble for eBook.