{"id":8142,"date":"2019-12-26T12:14:22","date_gmt":"2019-12-26T17:14:22","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/meadowparty.com\/blog\/?p=8142"},"modified":"2019-12-26T12:14:24","modified_gmt":"2019-12-26T17:14:24","slug":"girl-woman-other","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/meadowparty.com\/blog\/2019\/12\/26\/girl-woman-other\/","title":{"rendered":"Girl, Woman, Other."},"content":{"rendered":"\n

The Booker Prize committee ignored the rules of their own\naward when they gave the 2019 Booker to two titles, claiming they couldn’t break\nthe tie. The co-winners, Margaret Atwood’s The Testaments<\/em>, the sequel to\nher prescient novel The Handmaid’s Tale<\/a><\/em>;\nand Bernardine Evaristo’s Girl, Woman,\nOther<\/a><\/em>, are both ardently feminist works that attack serious cultural issues\nof our moment in time, the former going after our deteriorating political\nenvironment, the latter the singular experiences of women of color, especially\nthose who are also LGBTQ+. I haven’t read the former yet, but the latter is at\nthe same time a thoughtful and engrossing set of intertwined tales of a dozen\nwomen spanning multiple generations, and a pretentious bit of prose gimmickry\nthat often reads like a student parody of e.e. cummings.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Girl, Woman, Other <\/em>is a novel of intersectionality \u2013 every\ncharacter in it fits into at least two cultural minority groups, usually women\nof color, but also with several characters who are lesbians, trans, or otherwise\nLGBTQ+, and several of whom are or grew up economically disadvantaged. Evaristo\ndepicts this through their own stories, which vary from the tragic to the\ndarkly comic, which themselves intersect with each other in varying ways, sometimes\nrather slightly while at other times deeply woven together. Each of the stories,\nhowever, at least attempts to depict some aspect of women’s experiences in a\nmodern world that is at the same time the best situation in modern history for\nwomen of color and for LGBTQ+ people and also still full of barriers and\nchallenges, often all the more frustrating for how needless and outdated they\nare, to anyone who isn’t straight, white, male, and well-off.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The hazard of a short-story novel like Girl, Woman, Other<\/em>\nis that the form rarely gives the reader time or depth to connect with any individual\ncharacters, and I think that is generally true here since characters appear\nprominently in their own stories and mostly vanish beyond them. Amma, the black\nlesbian playwright of the opening story and whose major production serves as\nthe connection point for many of the stories herein, is the strongest and most\nfully developed character, but her own history is more of a foundation in the\nbook than a compelling story in its own right, while that of her ex-girlfriend\nDominique, who follows a domineering militant lesbian vegan feminist to a\ncommune in the United States, is the most interesting for plot but also maddening\nfor her own inability to recognize when she’s being gaslit and abused. (Not\nthat these things don’t happen regularly in the real world.) The most balanced\nstories are those that reach back into the past and follow a character from youth\nto her old age, such as the teacher Shirley, who is disillusioned by the school\nwhere she works and the declining efforts of her students but dedicates herself\nto working with any student she thinks has the potential to move beyond their\ncurrent circumstances. <\/p>\n\n\n\n<\/a>\n\n\n\n

The real downfall of Girl, Woman, Other<\/em>, however, is\nthe prose style, which mimics stream-of-consciousness poetry but becomes\nextremely tiresome over 400+ pages. Far too much of the book comprises sentences\nfragments, missing punctuation or capitalization, or half-finished thoughts,\nwhich might work well for a single chapter here but becomes overbearing by the\nend of the book. Evaristo is trying to imitate a style of thought, but these\ntwelve women can’t possibly all think the same way, and giving them all the\nsame voice through one hackneyed device serves to diminish their individuality\nas characters when the entire point of the book seems to be to celebrate the uniqueness\nof each of them, and of every reader as well.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

I did fly through the book, since several of the chapters\nwere fascinating and read like strong novellas, and because the prose style\nleaves so much white space on each page that the book isn’t as long as the page\ncount might indicate. Maybe the cultural import of the book, the exposure of\nintersectional issues to the wider audience, was enough to justify it winning\nthe prize (along with what sounds like a lifetime achievement award for Atwood).\nMaybe as a straight white male reader, I didn’t get some of what Evaristo was\ntrying to express. I believe, however, that I understood enough of the points\nof the novel to know that the way in which she told the story was what kept me\nat arm’s length from its content.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Next up: Ursula K. Le Guin’s The Lathe of Heaven<\/a><\/em>.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

The Booker Prize committee ignored the rules of their own award when they gave the 2019 Booker to two titles, claiming they couldn’t break the tie. The co-winners, Margaret Atwood’s The Testaments, the sequel to her prescient novel The Handmaid’s Tale; and Bernardine Evaristo’s Girl, Woman, Other, are both ardently feminist works that attack serious […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[112,1141,143,432],"class_list":["post-8142","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized","tag-english-literature","tag-intersectionality","tag-lgbt-literature","tag-man-booker-prize","entry"],"amp_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/meadowparty.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/8142","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/meadowparty.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/meadowparty.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/meadowparty.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/meadowparty.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=8142"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/meadowparty.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/8142\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":8144,"href":"https:\/\/meadowparty.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/8142\/revisions\/8144"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/meadowparty.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=8142"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/meadowparty.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=8142"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/meadowparty.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=8142"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}