Book Review: THE BOOK OF JOAN by Lidia Yuknavitch

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Notes on Diversity/Inclusion:

The Book of Joan seems to have a very complicated relationship to marginalization and oppression, and it doesn’t seem to realize it. This is a book that is trying to say something about the nested issues of gender oppression and environmentalism, but because the story takes place on a space station, and because there are issues of access getting to that space station, the cast is largely wealthy and largely (literally) White.

This is a book full of very strange contradictions. For example, queerness is represented–Trinculo is a queer man, and Joan and Leone are clearly in love. However, none of those characters are in a satisfying relationship. Trinculo is queer and obsessed with what he’s lost, and ultimately becomes a tragic/fallen queer character. Joan and Leone are a pair of untouched and intact people, in love, but they can’t consummate their relationship because of Joan’s otherworldy abilities. So, even though queerness is threaded through the book, no one is getting what they want. No one is happy. The way these queer characters are written feels regressive.

Content Warnings for Book:

Oh, wow, so many:

• Transphobia, in multiple ways, at multiple times, by multiple characters. IT WAS A THING.*
• Racism in the form of literal colorblindness–the ascendant denizens of the space station CIEL all have paper-white skin, and one of the protagonists, Christine, remarks that this transformation renders race a meaningless construct. I don’t think that’s actually true at all.**
• Sexualized and gendered brutality more than once. Women’s bodies throughout the book are a site of violence.
• There is at least one especially vicious beating of a queer man, and it happens, in my reading, at least partially because of his sexuality.
• Christine burns text into her skin, and the scarification she practices is both ritualized and commodified. There are scenes throughout the book of her practice where she describes the act with extremely explicit and lurid detail, so if you have a sensitive stomach go in knowing. There is also an element of this thread of the text that really treads a line of self-harm in my reading of the book.

Review:

Blurb (from Goodreads):

In the near future, world wars have transformed the earth into a battleground. Fleeing the unending violence and the planet’s now-radioactive surface, humans have regrouped to a mysterious platform known as CIEL, hovering over their erstwhile home. The changed world has turned evolution on its head: the surviving humans have become sexless, hairless pale-white creatures floating in isolation, inscribing stories upon their skin.

Out of the ranks of the endless wars rises Jean de Men, a charismatic and bloodthirsty cult leader who turns CIEL into a quasi-corporate police state. A group of rebels unite to dismantle his iron rule—galvanized by the heroic song of Joan, a child-warrior who possesses a mysterious force that lives within her and communes with the earth. When de Men and his armies turn Joan into a martyr, the consequences are astonishing. And no one—not the rebels, Jean de Men, or even Joan herself—can foresee the way her story and unique gift will forge the destiny of an entire world for generations.

A riveting tale of destruction and love found in direst of places—even at the extreme end of post-human experience—Lidia Yuknavitch’s The Book of Joan raises questions about what it means to be human, the fluidity of sex and gender, and the role of art as means for survival.

Reading The Book of Joan was an immensely strange experience for me. I enjoyed this book, and I hated it.

Let me explain.

Lidia Yuknavitch is a great writer. She writes with passion and urgency and fluency. I could not stop reading this book even as it became clear that this book was Definitely Not For Me. I just loved the way she wrote. I loved the way she put sentences together. I loved the way she structured the book. She does this fantastic thing where she starts the book in first person in Christine’s POV, then switches to Joan’s POV in third person, then switches to Christine again, this time in third person, and then ends the book in Joan in first person. It worked! I could not believe that it worked, and I loved it!

But the content of the book itself was not good. It was like walking through a restaurant, and everything looks and smells amazing, and then you realize it’s a seafood restaurant and, oops, you’re allergic to shellfish.

The thing about The Book of Joan is that it was trying to have a conversation with me that I was deeply uninterested in having. Yuknavitch is trying to talk about sex and gender and the primacy of binaries in both of those things, and their relationship to environmentalism, in ways that I am fundamentally sick of hearing about. This is an allegorical, and somewhat satirical book, and for a book like that to work, you have to be willing to engage with its philosophical underpinnings. The philosophical underpinnings of The Book of Joan seem largely rooted in lesbian separatism, trans-exclusionary radical feminism, and literally no understanding of asexuality at all.

Leaving aside that the actual mechanics of the plot (CIEL, the rapid mutation of humanity to shed genitalia, etc) do not make sense and were not adequately explained, the book overlooked the actual real-life fluidity of gender and sexuality, despite what the blurb said.

• In a world where virtually all people suddenly have androgynous bodies, everyone is still using binary gender pronouns. Why? And also, do no non-binary people exist, either before or after? Yes, I understand that the move to this new body cause Christine dysphoria, but the move to this new body would actually remove a lot of my dysphoria! Nothing like this was explored at all in the book.
• Was no one asexual or aromantic on CIEL? These people were obsessed with having sex.*** There was truly no one who was like “oh, well, no worries.” COME ON.
• Besides that, there’s more than one way to explore one’s sexuality beside with genitalia. Think broader.

This is not even getting into my actual plot questions, which are legion. The big issue was that this book was deeply transphobic. Joan, the hero of the book, is the type to talk about “womb magic.” The main villain is eventually revealed to be a transgender man–and after the reveal, is gleefully deadnamed and misgendered for the rest of the book. The horrific acts he metes out are directly linked in the text to his hatred of women and his own body. This is a book that made me, as a reader, feel targeted by the text itself.

Takeaway & Rating:

The Book of Joan is a glorious hot mess of a book. Yuknavitch is a talented writer, but her ideas about gender and sexuality are outdated, and her play at allegory left me cold.

*Again, I really cannot in good conscience recommend this book to others with its handling of trans issues.

**Take, for example, people of color who are also albinos. Race is, of course, about pigmentation, but it’s also about far more than pigmentation, and only a white writer would think that literally whitewashing all bodies would eliminate racism.

***One of the Plot Questions I had, and maybe it was explained and I missed it, was that Jean De Men forbade everyone on CIEL from banging For Reasons, but I don’t know what those reasons were?? So, no one had junk, but wanted to bang, but COULDN’T, so it was VERY FRAUGHT. But I know had I been on CIEL that a) I would have been way less dysphoric than I am this moment and b) I would have been the only one there with any damn chill.

 

Book Review: CLOUD ATLAS

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Notes on Diversity:
This is another book like The Windup Girl that is what I would call “surface diverse”–as in scratch the surface and all the diversity is gone. It’s wrapped up in a veneer of diversity, but it’s just a veneer. And for a reader like me who craves non-mainstream narratives (because I am marginalized along multiple axes, and I am sick of dominant narratives being shoved down my throat) these surface diverse books really stick in my craw.

There are Asian characters in Cloud Atlas¹. There are Moriori characters, though none of them are ever relegated to anything but side characters who must be rescued by an empathic/enlightened white man. There is Luisa Rey, a scrappy ’70s Latina private eye. There are far-future characters who live in Hawaii, who as far as I can tell, are not coded or explicitly raced, but I read them as white.

There are queer characters. Robert Frobisher, a brilliant young composer, and Rufus Sixsmith, smitten by Forbisher. The pair of them star-crossed and epistolary, and ultimately Tragic Queers–one of them suicidal and the other forever pining the loss. I don’t know much about Mitchell, but the narrative strikes me as the straight-person-writes-the-Bury-Your-Queers situation all over again. So, you know, it’s “diverse”…but is it the kind of diversity that really gets us anywhere?

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Review:
So. The book.

I was expecting to love the book. I love narrative structures; I love audacious books that play with expectations of narrative structure. I knew very little going into David Mitchell’s Cloud Atlas except that it was speculative fiction and that it was played with structure. Something about nested narrators.

It does play with structure. In fact, its whole conceit rests on the structure piece–if you can’t go with that, then the book folds up like a house of cards in a slight breeze. If literally any part of the fabulous dazzling structure of the book doesn’t work for you, then the entire book doesn’t work for you, which renders the book not really a book so much as a magic trick, a gimmick.

The structure is intricate and fascinating, unfurling as it does starting in the past, creeping up to the present, then into future-dystopian Korea, and landing in far-future Hawaii before furling up again in reverse, revisiting the narrators from the previous sections in opposite order. Each of the narrators has a distinct voice and tone; some Mitchell pulls off beautifully. For me, the Adam Ewing in the first and last sections worked well, as did the Luisa Rey sections.² I was emotionally gutpunched by the Frobisher sections, but for the wrong reasons.³

The central piece of the book–“Sloosha’s Crossin’ an’ Ev’rythin’ After”–did not work for me at all. Partly this is because as someone with a ‘dumb’ accent⁴ I am particularly attuned to the way certain accents serve as markers of stupidity/class and how writing in dialect by people without those accents serves to communicate that, and this generally rubs me the wrong way. I literally had to grit my teeth to read this section. Partly this section did not work for me because the book should have ended here. We did not need to re-furl after “Sloosha’s Crossin'”; everything that happens after are essentially drawn-out codas, stuck after simply for structure’s sake. The actual plot, what little there is of it, truly ends in this section. All the tiny reveals stuck in the ending codas could have neatly been worked in, as foreshadowing, beforehand.

All this is to say that I do love it when authors play with structure, but only if they have a depth of story to support that structure. Only if their actually doing something with that structure. I’m not certain that the structure served anything in Mitchell’s plot here but showing off. The plot was exceedingly thin, actually, stretched across some very fancy digs. The structure wasn’t enough.

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¹The Sonmi-451 section is set in a dystopian Korean state. I don’t have a specific enough sense of Korean culture to know if Mitchell succeeded in his representation of Koreans here. I know that Mitchell lived for a time in Japan, and I wonder if he got future-Korea right, or if it’s “Korea” with all the blanks filled in with Japan. I don’t know enough about either to be able to tell.

²We can’t even really sink into the Luisa Rey sections, either, as they are revealed to possibly not to have happened. In the Cavendish sections, Luisa Rey’s sections are revealed to be a manuscript he is reading, which makes me question if she is even real. If a Latina is not real in your story, does she count to your book’s diversity?

³Because I’m queer, basically any queer narrative is going to grab me by the shirtfront and not let me go. I was more heavily invested in Rufus Sixsmith and Robert Frobisher than any other characters in the book even though as soon as they were introduced I had an inkling of where that story thread was going. I strongly, strongly dislike the Tragic Queers trope, especially if it’s written by someone who does not identify as queer themselves.

⁴Even after years of trying lose it in my youth to make myself acceptably smart I still have distinct traces of my East Texas twang. Not a genteel southern drawl, mind you, but that harsh, chopped Texas twang. The stuff of Dubya.

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Book Review: THE WINDUP GIRL

Amazon | Goodreads

Notes on Diversity:
On the surface, this book looks diverse. It’s set in Thailand, and at least two of the viewpoint characters (Lieutenant Kanya and Emiko) are not only people of color but also women. Lieutenant Kanya is also queer. I read this book because it was a high-profile well-respected award-winning diverse science fiction book. At least, this is what it purports to be.

This is actually a case of diversity-gone-wrong. Anderson Lake, a White cis-het man, is the dominant POV and the most developed character. Thailand is largely seen through his eyes, and the rest of the cast exists to add color and spice to his story. This is a case where, in spite of the fact that Anderson Lake is one of the few White characters in the story, basically all of the people of color suffer from tokenism. They are painted in broad strokes, and those broad strokes are guided, unfortunately, by stereotypes.

The Windup Girl is one long diversity fail.

Review:
The environment is in shambles. Espionage in the 23rd century, at least as embodied by Anderson Lake, takes the form of swiping the location of a Thai seedbank. Along the way, we are introduced to Emiko, the titular Windup Girl, a Japanese New Person sex slave, and Lieutenant Kanya, a policewoman embroiled in some very complicated politics.

It is a setup that makes for an interesting book. And Paolo Bacigalupi is a good writer. But the book fails, and it fails because there is actually very little that is new here. The spec fic stuff in it is just bells and whistles, but the ideas are actually just rehashes of Orientalist male fantasies that have been around for centuries.

This is not a book about biotechnology or Thailand. This is just another book about how an East Asian woman (Emiko) seems so foreign to a White man that she appears soulless, but that she hold immense and disruptive sexual appeal to him anyway. And, of course, she is bred to be submissive and obedient. Name a trope related to the fetishization about Asian women and it’s here, but it’s played completely straight.

Honestly, the only reason I gave this book two stars instead of one was Lieutenant Kanya. She appeared on the page as a queer woman of color with at least some interiority, and she was a reprieve from the unrelenting Orientalist assault that was the Anderson Lake-Emiko storyline. Like Emiko, Kanya is not free of stereotypes: she is a butch lesbian who is humorless and who ultimately ends up alone¹. But, hell, at least Kanya got some interesting things do to plot-wise. At least she wasn’t, quite literally, a lab-grown sex-slave for a White man to ogle who played into harmful stereotypes rather than dismantling them.

It was strange reading this book, because it was so well-received. There are times when you read a book and it’s truly like the rest of the world is reading an altogether different book. Yes, Bacigalupi can construct a nice sentence. Yes, thinking about a world populated with dirigables and armed genetically enhanced elephants is pretty cool. But the titular character² is a damsel in distress in the worst possible way; Emiko’s storylines start antiquated and continue to be so throughout the book. Bacigalupi has nothing fresh or new to say about her. This book is far from feminist or intersectional.

I expect more from fiction. As a reader on the margins, I demand more from fiction, especially well-regarded fiction. Well-regarded fiction should treat its vulnerable, exploited, marginalized characters with at least a modicum of respect. They should be granted a shred of agency.

¹Because Lesbians Can Never Be Happy

²That the title is the slur used against the New People really sets the tone for Emiko’s storyline in hindsight.

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Book Review: HYSTERICAL: ANNA FREUD’S STORY

HYSTERICAL: ANNA FREUD’S STORY, by Rebecca Coffey, is an historical novel told from the perspective of Anna Freud. It is a memoir Anna writes on her deathbed, and in true Freudian fashion as Anna reflects back on her life—the choices she made, the actions which defined her, how she came to be who she was—much of her memoir centers on her childhood. And much of her childhood ruminations center on her relationship with her monstrously overshadowing father, Sigmund Freud.

In the Author’s Note of the book, Rebecca Coffey, a journalist by training, mentions that she did not set out to write a novel. When the various estates and Freudian strongholds kept Anna Freud’s personal letters and writings under lock and key, Coffey turned to fiction to fill in the blank spaces. This, I think, is an admirable approach—Anna’s is a voice that deserves to be heard. Anna was a lesbian, but her father’s work denounced her sexuality. At the same time, Anna Freud, of all of Freud’s children, was his clear intellectual heir and also his caretaker in his old age. They had a close professional and emotional relationship, but how did those theories about Anna’s “brokenness” affect her? Despite his warnings about the inherently erotic nature of the analytic relationship, Freud analyzed Anna, probably about her sexuality—what must that have done to their relationship? These are the questions Coffey sought to explore with her novel, and they are good ones. They are ripe for exploration. I was chomping at the bit to read this book.

This is a situation, ultimately, of unfulfilled promise. When Coffey allows Anna to delve into the questions above, it is only with glancing blows. The story behind the book—Coffey’s search for answers, the tired old Freudian vanguard circling the wagons and shutting her out, her turning to fiction to create answers for herself—is more intriguing than the book itself, which is a great pity.

For the book to work, Anna has to shine. As a narrator, for us as readers to carry with her, I feel the book could have gone one of two ways: she could have been blisteringly honest, terrifyingly honest about everything. There would have been anger, and evisceration, and confusion. A lot of emotion. A lot more emotion than she displays in the book as Coffey wrote it. Or, Anna could have been inherently unreliable—equivocating, hero-worshiping, lauding Sigmund in ways that betray to the reader that perhaps not all was what it seemed. Instead, we got an Anna who was removed and distant, smirking and gentle. It seemed it wasn’t her own story she was even telling.

The rhythm of the narrative was strange; so much focus on some episodes of her life and so little focus on others. This is, perhaps, an odd complaint to make here, but I would have preferred the book to be less psychoanalytically focused—I would have liked fewer exhaustive sessions of Anna detailing her weird dreams to her father and more scenes of her actively living her own life. I wanted to see and feel her actually fall in love with the women in her life and experience her grappling with what that meant—not in sessions with her father, but in her own mind and in her skin. Ultimately, given the tightness of the focus on the analysis sessions with Sigmund, and given the narrowing in on his homophobia, the book became more about Anna’s inability to save him from himself than about her thoughts or her life or her actions.

As a novel, the book suffered from a lack of characterization and flawed pacing. To succeed, Anna’s voice needed to be strong enough to carry the book, but Coffey never found it—Anna drifted into the background, and as in history, she was overshadowed once again by her larger-than-life father here. I applaud the intent of this work, but the execution left much to be desired for me.

Book Review: HOW CHILDREN SUCCEED

Hint: try being white and wealthy, kids!

Paul Tough’s How Children Succeed: Grit, Curiosity and the Hidden Power of Character is another in a long line of books which tries to determine how we can better serve “underperforming” children—specifically children in poverty and children of color. Tough posits a fairly new approach to this social problem: character. He draws a distinction between cognitive skills, which are most often expressed through academic ability, and noncognitive skills like perseverance, conscientiousness, and eagerness to learn. Over the course of some 200 pages, Tough explores how and why these noncognitive skills develop from a variety of approaches—interviews with students and educators, positive psychological research, studies of rats’ mothering habits and biological stress responses.

The context of the book, though, is as important to my reading of How Children Succeed as its actual content. This is a book I see around my workplace often. It was, in fact, loaned to me by a coworker. And last year, while I was on fellowship as an Education Pioneers Analyst Fellow, some of my cohort read it in a book study. I work in the ed reform movement (something I have deeply ambivalent feelings about), and this book is fast becoming part of the ed reform lingo. It’s a natural fit. This book (and by extension its writer) comes from the same place as my TFA alum and Broad resident coworkers: this is a book written by a deeply privileged person who wants to fix education. That’s a noble goal. But the problem I see over and over in the ed reform movement is that these privileged people cannot see past their privilege, and so the ways they want to fix education continually read to me as shallow and ineffective.

Tough’s book is a great example of this tension. Tough grew up middle class, white, cisgender and male. At several points in the book, he discusses his decision to drop out of Columbia University as a tortured eighteen year old. The fateful dropout decision is not predicated on some external forces (a financial crisis or having to return home to take care of a relative in a tight spot) but on a vague notion that he wants to “try something that’s new”. Tough ends up bicycling halfway across the country, then returns to college only to drop out a second time. So, this is the author’s background. His research and reporting for the book takes him to the South Side of Chicago where he tries to understand the lives of struggling high schoolers. He seems to see these kids’ struggles mostly as a result of two things: the high levels of stress they’ve encountered in their short, violent, impoverished lives and the apparent absence of secure attachments to caregivers. Tough uses research on the HPA axis and biological effects of stress and research on attachment theory to largely explain why and how these kids haven’t yet developed the cognitive skills needed to get them to and through college. And while both of those things may play some small part in their current trajectory I believe he severely overstates the effects of both.

Let me tell you where I’m coming from. I am white, but I grew up poor and queer and struggling with my gender in a small, conservative town in Texas. My parents were both trapped in substance abuse. I was alternately neglected and abused by them, and as such, never developed a secure attachment to either. I also excelled in school (though I was a troublemaker). I got out—got into college, graduated, and then got a doctorate. I am what educational psychologists call “resilient”. I have what Tough calls character in spades. My sister is less resilient. The major difference between my sister and I? She is dealing with a different level of mental health issues than I am. She has a learning disability that was never diagnosed. She didn’t excel in school. In a word, she didn’t look like she could pass as middle class.

Tough makes the case that if poor kids have a positive adult role model to help them develop ‘character’ that they can ‘succeed’. He never stops to consider that what he has deemed ‘character’ is a very white middle-class idea of character. It is deeply steeped in the Protestant Work Ethic, for instance, and it may be that poor kids of color are developing a different kind of character, a set of noncognitive skills acutely attuned to the context in which they live. My avoidant attachment to my parents growing up, for instance, was a totally appropriate way of managing my relationship to unstable and unreliable caregivers. The same with his unspoken assumptions about what success looks like—this is a white, middle class idea of success. When Tough abstracts character and success from the context these people live in, divorcing it so neatly from the structural and institutional oppression caused by racism and classism, he presents the answer to our ‘education system’s failures’ as very simple. While reading the book, the message I got was that all we have to do is train poor black kids to act like well-off white kids and they’ll do just fine. The fact that this strips them of their culture, that it separates them from their families, that faking-it-til-you-make-it is another kind of colorblindness is not addressed. And I can say from my personal experience that I faked-it-til-I-made-it. That’s exactly how I got to and through both college and graduate school. And now I’m upwardly mobile but I’m still a kid who grew up poor. Navigating social class has only gotten harder as I’ve moved up the social ladder. I can’t imagine what it would be to be black or Latino on top of it and to have my marginalization so clearly written on my skin.

The heart of my issue with the ed reform movement, and this is something that Tough’s book falls prey to, is that it doesn’t see the American education system for what it really is. Today, the American Dream is synonymous with educational attainment. The problem is that the American Dream was never meant to apply to most of America. We’ve constructed our education system to explicitly create class divisions along racial lines. Our education system is not failing—it’s achieving exactly what it’s built to do. There’s no reforming it. No amount of character classes in charter schools attracting smart but impoverished kids of color is going to change that. The ed reform movement is a predominantly white, middle class movement and as such it is a movement that makes certain assumptions about the fairness and good faith of the institution of education as it currently exists that are false.

I succeeded in life because I am privileged enough to blend in with the privileged ruling class. I’m white. I’m academically gifted. I was an avoidantly attached enough kid that I was fully comfortable leaving behind my broken family. I worked very hard to lose my scraggly Texan accent when I arrived at college. The noncognitive skills that got me where I am today are largely those that let me forcibly blend into an unfamiliar environment ripe with opportunity. I am a fluke. I am the exception. And it’s not my kid sister’s fault or the poor black kid on the South Side’s fault that they didn’t make it. For other people it’s not so simple as just developing a better character, and on every page I felt insulted at the implication that Tough felt he’d found the silver bullet in this. There are no silver bullets. There’s no reform. The only thing that will work is rebuilding the system from the ground up. There’s no improving an inherently racist and classist institution—there’s only replacing it.