The Book of Night Women by Marlon JamesMy rating: 5 of 5 stars
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Wednesday, September 29, 2021
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Wednesday, September 8, 2021
Review: The Office of Historical Corrections
The Office of Historical Corrections by Danielle EvansMy rating: 5 of 5 stars
Even before this collection gets to the final, title novella, it’s a book that grapples with the weight of history. We get a series of stories with a similar, sophisticated narrative pattern: a present-tense story with a modest conflict sitting on top of an earlier experience woven into the proceedings.
In “Alcatraz,” a woman explores her feelings toward a cousin when each is descended from a great-grandfather wrongfully sentenced to Alcatraz prison. There’s not much to the present tense – which is by design – but it rests on a couple generations of family members working toward full exoneration.
In “Boys Go to Jupiter,” a woman tries to reinvent herself after an accident that cost the life of her best friend’s brother. She tries to live as if that past never happened, but she’s nevertheless shaped by it.
And in “Anything Could Disappear,” a woman trying to start a new life after a brief stint as a drug courier accidentally becomes acting parent. She manages to invent an entire new life with a fresh career, a boyfriend, and a child. All the while, though, she knows she is denying an earlier life, and that denial pushes against her contentment. In a time when she wants to pretend that history cannot contain her, she finds – as the title says – that nothing is permanent.
Most, though not all of these, deal as well with the nature of race. Much of what’s most impressive here turns on Evans’s ability to share how much of our present sits on a history inflected by a structural racism. It’s no accident that the ancestor in “Alcatraz” is African-American. In “Boys Go to Jupiter,” the protagonist’s present-tense conflict turns on her accidentally becoming a social media star when she’s photographed in a Confederate flag bikini. That’s when the fact of the African-Americanness of her childhood friend takes on a new light. She’s able to experience the privilege of her whiteness even as she has left an unexamined trail of hurt behind her.
All of that comes before we get the title story which makes explicit the themes the collection explores to that point. Cassie works for a governmental agency charged with correcting factual errors of history. It’s an opportunity for her to confront some of the wrongs of racism, but it’s tempered. She can correct only factual errors, not interpretive ones.
The central, present-tense concern of the story deals with a plaque acknowledging the Depression-era arson/murder of a Black man’s business in rural Wisconsin. Cassie’s longtime frenemy, Genevieve, wants to drive home the indignity of the event, raising the ire of a white nationalist [who, SPOILER:, turns out to be of African-Americe descent himself even though he denies it]. Further investigation reveals that the victim did not die in the fire, though. He escaped and was declared dead. That sets up the striking conflict of Cassie intending to give the straight facts – there was no murder – and Genevieve wanting to play up the spirit of the truth, that a mob of whites stole and tried to murder their one Black neighbor.
Bottom line, this is serious and thoughtful fiction that manages to clarify the stakes of many of our contemporary socio-political concerns. It’s often funnier and lighter than I think I’ve so far characterized it – which is a good thing – and Evans is a talented enough writer to keep things moving through that weighty material.
I’m impressed with the power of a consequential new (to me at least) voice, and I want to get back to her first book as well.
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Saturday, September 4, 2021
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