JCO: Black Girl White Girl

Hi Erik,

Thank you for recommending this book to me. I enjoyed it very much and think that it is very well written and constructed. I was moved many times while reading it and felt how powerfully the story was handled.

As to the subject of grief, I agree that it does not deal with it directly even though it is a book of reminiscences about Minette's life which ended so abruptly. Everything happens as if it were now without the hindsight or colouring of the afterwards.

The only quibble I have about this novel is its ending. I was a little surprised that in the end the main character was in fact not Minette but Genna's father, Max. She says "For, unwittingly, as I composed my text about Minette Swift, I was composing a shadow-text that had little to do with her. I'd intended to compose an inquiry into Minette Swift's life/death exclusively, but like an eclipse of the sun the shadow-text began to intrude. I could not seem to prevent it! The shadow-text is an inquiry into Max Meade and a portrait of the daughter who betrayed him."

I felt that the shadow-text did in fact become a total eclipse of the main text and that was disappointing. In a sense I felt that the subject of her death, her disappearance from life, was only touched upon. Genna suffered a nervous break-down as a result of all that was happening in her life but when she had confided to the resident adviser in total distress she talked about her father not her dear friend. She protected Minette to the very end, not wanting the world to pry into her life, even when delirious with high fever - but she betrayed her father. Interesting.

It would be great to hear what other people thought about the book - if it is still fresh in your minds. I think the relationship between the two girls and the racial issues are very complex and fascinating.

Does anybody know how much is fact and how much is fiction in this book?

Regards to all,

Marie (Sweden)

----- Original Message -----

From: Eric Anderson

To: jco@usfca.edu

Sent: Thursday, May 17, 2007 1:09 AM

Subject: RE: JCO: grief

Hi Marie

 

I'm sorry I didn't get a chance to answer you earlier when you asked about the subject of grief in Black Girl/White Girl. (It's been a very busy week for me.) Firstly, it's a brilliant book regardless and deserves to be read. Geena, the protagonist, does grieve deeply for her roommate, but it's a very complicated relationship to understand. I'll try not to spoil the plot. But Geena basically comes to view her black roommate Minette as a sister. In forming this kind of imaginary relationship/kinship with Minette she idealizes a lot about her, overlooking severe problems she has and the fact that Minette doesn't wish to have such a close friendship with Geena. The book mainly explores how this relationship develops and how both girls in the book have some fundamental misunderstandings about each other based on their racial identities, despite trying not to let the racial divide impede the friendship. Geena's desire to have such a close friendship/sisterhood with Minette seems to really come from the shortcomings she has in her own disparate messy family situation. The novel doesn't really deal with "the aftermath" as it were, a person coming to terms with someone's death so much as chart the course of a friendship between these girls. I hope that answers your question about the relevance of grief in Black Girl/White Girl. If you choose to read it, I'd love to hear what your reaction to it was and how you felt the subject of grief was dealt with in the book. In case you hadn't noticed, the paperback is coming out later this month. You also may be interested in Oates' new novel The Gravedigger's Daughter which is also released around the same time. It's a masterful, powerful work which also deals with this theme in its own way and perhaps this can be discussed more amongst the group when it is released.

 

All the best,

Eric

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From: rejment@bredband.net
To: jco@usfca.edu
Subject: JCO: grief
Date: Wed, 16 May 2007 19:19:42 +0200

Hello Everybody,

I am writing on the subject of grief and JCO again. I have read a little about Black Girl/White Girl, including some excerpts, but I have not yet read the book itself. Clearly Genna grieves for her roommate and wonders about the justice of death, and the strangeness of its choices.  I wonder, however, if those who have read the book would care to comment about how important this theme is in this particular work and how it is handled.

I think that JCO is such a powerful and sensitive writer that whatever subject she decides to write about - it becomes deep and multidimensional but it still may be just a footnote in the book.

Anybody?

Thanks,

Marie

----- Original Message -----

From: Eric Anderson

To: jco@usfca.edu

Sent: Sunday, May 13, 2007 3:16 PM

Subject: RE: JCO: Missing Mom

Hello Marie
 
I agree that Missing Mom is a very moving novel for the reasons you described.
 
Another book I read recently which deals so powerfully with the subject of grief is Joan Didion's memoir The Year of Magical Thinking. It demonstrates how emotional response can't be regulated by rational thinking, how the physical presence of those we've lost can take up habitation in our minds and the way we live our daily lives. It's a beautiful form of tribute despite how painful a process it is. You may be interested in reading Oates' novel American Appetites if you haven't already which partly deals with grief and loss concerning a relationship between a husband and wife which was much more tumultuous than that which Nikki had with her mother. However, the daughter's way of mourning is similar in some ways to that of Missing Mom.
 
Eric

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From: rejment@bredband.net
To: jco@usfca.edu
Subject: JCO: Missing Mom
Date: Sun, 13 May 2007 10:59:40 +0200

I've just finished reading "Missing Mom". I was truly moved by it maybe because I have recently experienced the death of my sister, with whom we were very close, and I could relate to Nikki's feelings so well. Nikki tried to impersonate her mother and I tried to impersonate my sister – like Nikki I have tried to become a new me.

The subject of death of the loved ones and our coping mechanisms to survive without them is quite painful to those who have been through it but maybe quite abstract to those who have not.

Has anybody read a good novel that handles the topic as sensitively as JCO?

Cheers,

Marie

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Re: JCO: The Gravediggers Daughter & "Cousins" WARNING PLOTS DESCRIBED

Hi, Nicole.  I got a copy of the recent JCO story collection, HIGH LONESOME, which contains the relevant story "The Cousins," which first appeared in Harper's in 2005, I think.  Unfortunately, I don't have a copy of GRAVEDIGGER'S DAUGHTER handy to compare the two versions of the correspondence between the 60ish cousins.  I believe the later variant, which ends GD, is quite different, even though it's essentially the same two women characters. 

     In "Cousins," Rebecca approaches Freyda after reading Freyda's childhood holocaust memoir "Back from the Dead."  (Freyda, by the way despises the word "Holocaust, " declaring "I never use this word that slides off American tongues now like grease.")  At first Freyda shuns her "tenacious American cousin" Rebecca, who begs Freyda to come visit her retirement home in Florida.  Little by little the emotional power balance shifts between the two correspondents until, by the end, Freyda -- in her own lofty way -- is begging Rebecca to let her come forth from her Chicago skyscraper "aerie" to flat, "boring" Florida for a visit.  It's a must-read story, collected for the first time in BEST AMERICAN SHORT STORIES 2005, and then in HIGH LONESOME (2006).

     Freyda appears to have been renamed Hazel in GD.  I don't think the letter device works well at the end of GD because there are hundreds of pages during which Hazel does not appear in Rebecca's thinking.  Rebecca's vanished cousin might be an important figure in R's mind as Rebecca goes through her youth and middle age, but I the reader did not feel it so. When I came to the letter exchange at the end of GD, I thought: Oh, I know how this goes now, because I had read the original story when it appeared in Harpers three years ago.

     For this and other reasons I do not consider GD among JCO's "best" fiction, although I would certainly place the short story "Cousins" in a hypothetical best of pantheon.  Still, GD is a vital link among the journey of JCO, and I hope more of you read it soon so we can discuss it here as a novel separate from its post-publication interviews, reviews, and articles.

Best,

Cyrano

 

 

In a message dated 8/17/2007 4:43:26 A.M. Eastern Daylight Time, ndprovencher@lake.ollusa.edu writes:

Eric,

I would have to say that the resolution of the characters is what was most perplexing to me.  I am very used to JCO "leaving" her characters to go on with their lives when the story ends, but leaving the characters off and then picking up with the cousins seemed strange to me.  It did not seem as if The Grave Digger's Daughter was a story about the cousins, although I can understand the need for Rebecca/Hazel to want to make that connection.  It is very ironic that the cousin desires this same connection only when it is to late. 

I agree with you completely about this novel being one of her finest.  It seemed that several of the themes she deals with in other works have a more finished feeling.  The girl who survives when she is not meant to (her father, Tignor, the man on the path - there were several for Rebecca) seems to take on a particularly American quality here (as she is often reminded by her father and brothers "you were born here") - however, the chronology of the story was such that these attempts were not the most important thing - but rather the dealing with the events that made Rebecca who she was (or was not) - a truly American idea of reinventing the self.  Was she denying this in contacting her cousin?  Or was it simply ok once she raised her son and felt detached from who she was?  I found this question arising again and again as I neared the end of the book. 

Your observations about family and drawing strength from family seem to answer this question in part - that she was returning to family.  But I wonder if any of it was real for her?  She invented the cousin for herself in childhood games as she reinvented herself several times over throughout the novel - I wonder if there was a common heritage?  Is family in genetics or what is invented?  She had genetic and familiar (as with Chez) connections - but none of them seemed real?

I did enjoy the novel - I found myself reading and rereading passages that were particularly striking.  I would love to hear what you and others think - and questions the novel might have raised ...

- Nicole (Texas)

 

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