Misery Business With Pickles On Top

How committed this slim book is to rolling in the muck of listless, lethargic apathy whilst coming of age in the 21st Century. Commits to its protagonist without potential. A protagonist that is an alcoholic pregnant pizza delivery girl (yup, you read that right), who descends into her own mental wasteland after she becomes attached to a customer that reaches out to her with an odd request for pizza toppings. Pizza Girl just commits, takes risks, and delivers (groan) a slice (groan) of unlikable characterization that can be of an acquired taste this side of pickles on pizza. 

With the hazy hustle of Los Angeles as the backdrop, our Pizza Girl is trudging through the mire of her existence. Fresh out of high school, she lives with her Korean immigrant mother who idolizes any and everything American (subtly coded as American = "Whiteness") and high school beau/baby daddy Billy who dropped his college plans and sports dreams to become a proper, supportive father. Both are well-meaning, but dote on her to an almost infantile, suppressive degree. She also hasn't reconciled over the lost of her alcoholic father, as his chaotic presence lingers in the car she makes deliveries in and the backyard shed where our Pizza Girl retreats for early morning booze binges. Her deliveries have her in contact with a collage of offbeat characters, but they don't stand out as much as Jenny, and her curiosity over the frazzled stay-at-home mom who out of the mundane blue requests pickles on her pizza for her finnicky son, functions as a distraction from her daily despondency. Jenny curiously connects with our Pizza Girl, but soon an awkward one-sided infatuation grows, unfurling into something a bit more convoluted, insidious even. 

Fast-paced and readable, this has a dark, sarcastic humor mixed in with millennial malaise that at times had me laugh out loud or wince --- depending on mood --- as Jean Kyoung Frazier is spot-on about how transient, tense, and truly ridiculous, your emerging twenties are. There is also a familiar set-up here, as it is this zany tightrope walk between the adolescent acerbity of Juno, despondent minimum wage of pending mamahood of Waitress, and the dire delusions of Taxi Driver. It comes across redundant, but Frazier's prose allows her tale to wobble and walk well into being a wholly original and engaging world which I appreciated.

What I didn't appreciate?: Making a character do 180 serial killer shit as some dark comedic "character development". 

Yeah...big nope.

Spoilers abound...

Home Sweet (Sinister) Home: Haunted Quarantines

"A house is a place to go back to, to regroup in. A house is a kind of a special corner of the universe. It's a place where everyone whoever lived in it still does.[...] That's the nature of a house. It absorbs its occupants, kind of keepin' them forever alive." --- 'Maynard's House'

It's fitting during quarantine I'd grab for books about houses. More exact, tales of being confined inside houses where the safety is questionable, and the mental deterioration and claustrophobic terrors reign. In a small way it's taking my mind off of the real time horrors of COVID-19 and the shitshow of a response to it (...and a bunch of other madness --- 2020 is truly on some ain't shit, isn't it?). Still, my imagination runs, and runs into thinking about when a home isn't a safe dwelling, where the walls that shield you from the outside betray (and how it must suck to be quarantined in a haunted house while you've got a damn pandemic going on...). Whether ancient in stance or freshly erected on disturbed ground, where its sinister legacy --- or awakening to --- outweighs its purported domesticity. *cue thunder clap*

I kind of inadvertently kicked off "haunted quarantine reads" with Rosemary's Baby, where a doomed heroine is sequestered in her spacious New York apartment by geriatric devil worshipers and a trash heap husband. While that tale was nestled 'safe' in a city of thousands, two others I read --- The Silent Companions and Maynard's House --- both take a different approach as they focus on the haunted dwellings that reside on the outskirts of civilization, consuming their occupants into a spiral of insanity and terror that falls on deaf ears *cue more thunder claps* Haunted house stories often are cut from the same Gothic cloth, but when they detour from the norm and elevate the "dark and desolate dwelling" motif, I tend to take notice, and these unique tales had my undivided attention whilst sequestered in my own confide space, scaring the wits outta me even more than my daily news feed...*cue thunder clap, evil laughter, howling wolf, and Toupee Fiasco's word vomit tweets* 

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"Ivy poured out of the eaves and engulfed the turrets at either end of the house. It looked dead. Everything was dead. Parterres lay prostrate beneath the soulless gaze of the windows, the hedges brown and riddled with holes. Vines choked the flowerbeds. Even the lawns were yellow and sparse, as if a contagion spread slowly throughout the grounds."

The Silent Companions occupies a bunch of cliches and worn-out tropes of the neo-Victorian novel. Crumbling mansion. A disturbing familial legacy. Locked up spider-webbed  "west wings" with ~secrets~ and yellow-paged diaries. Fidgety oddball servants. Paranoia around every corner. Our main character waking up in an insane asylum, committing some crime she swore she didn't commit ...yup, the Gothic motif gang is all here. Yet, to carry these tropes out in a fresh, intelligent and creepy way is where I commend author Laura Purcell. 

Purcell even forgoes an enigmatic brooding love interest a la Edward Rochester so we're left with focusing on the house of horrors our main heroine has stepped in. Oh, and our heroine isn't plain, or a Jane, but she's rather grouchy and bossy, and I guess you'd be too if you were widowed, pregnant, and had to live in a centuries-old clammy castle that carries the weight of a horrific legacy that keeps the surrounding townspeople on edge and its livestock on high alert. To see this constant complainer get taken for a ride was fun...until it wasn't, this when the house begins to show its true nature and intent, and our heroine begins slipping into serious darkness.

This isn't a perfect book, and can come off not as unique for its trove of tropes, but I appreciated being drawn in and feeling dread burn slow and steady, in a pacing that doesn't wander or waver on emitting a sense of mental dislodging throughout. I had to read this book in the daylight due to its utter creepiness --- and that's not usual for someone who relishes in horror reads.

As much as I tend to spoil things here and there for (over) analyzing sake, but I feel going into this book blind is the best bet. Not even knowing what a "silent companion" was when I dove in kept the the creep factor afloat and I dared not hop on Google for the answer. Still, once you do find out these companions were real deals (they're a type of wood-carved painting/sculpture that was popular in the Netherlands during the 17th Century) and realize Purcell turned some carved wood into a malicious antagonist, the fright is never diminished and takes on a sinister presence that becomes unimaginable. 

Disappearing Acts

Barring the full-throttle social media hype machine and the lofty 7-figure television adaptation deal Brit Bennett scored, what drew me to this book was the premise of racial passing. Of Louisiana-born twin sisters, Desiree and Stella Vignes, so light in color, with features that lean more Euro than Afro, that one decides to pass for white. 

The act of "passing", of colorist issues in the Black community, of being asked "what are you?", of the paper bag test, blue veins, of "light, bright and damn near white", of "good hair", of that "one drop rule"...all these divisive, archaic socialized barricades aren't lost on me, so going into this book wasn't a 'shock' or a revelation. 

Disclaimer time: I'm a "light bright" Black woman. I was raised in a Black family of variant brown, bronze, and cream shades, with some immediate family members who could 'pass' due to their light complexions. I've heard stories of certain, 'fairer' family members (my two grandmothers for starts) who've sat in the white sections of then-segregated movie theaters in East Texas without detection, and know of two distant relatives on both sides who've 'passed over' into becoming "white". One was, I believe, murdered once his true identity was found out. 

With all that being said, I proceeded to read The Vanishing Half with a bit of cautious optimism, or really optimistic apprehension. Character studies are my jam, as are mother and daughter debacles, add a little controversial race issues, and you have my full attention. Plus, the act of 'passing' quite fascinates? disturbs? me. How elusive, complex, almost performative it is to 'become' another race, or as the the wiki definition goes: "a person of color or of multiracial ancestry who assimilated into the white majority to escape the legal and social conventions of racial segregation and discrimination". 

'Passing' carries a different weight than it did back when Jim Crow laws ran rampant. It isn't seen as much of a risk or a survival technique to navigate segregated territories, but it does cause a pause, the usual Internet facepalm, and its own fresh set of controversies. Look no further when we see former brown-skinned people taking dips in the bleach (see: baseball all-star Sammy Sosa) or the cringing, appropriating opposite (see: "Blackfishing" and the "transracial" bigoted theatrics of Rachel Dolezal and Jessica Krueg). Self-hatred, racist ignorance, or "living their truth"? Never is there any clarity when it comes to self-identifying, never any clarity when it comes to defining the reasons why.

 

[Though I high-key find the insidious "blackfishing" and whatever lie Dolezal and Krueg kept telling themselves truly racist and infuriating. This esp. when these individuals are "rewarded" for their acts whether its a large (often lucrative) following on social media or positions in academics --- positions that could've gone to real Black people with similar or even better qualifications, and aren't liars...]

With America having to reckon with its original sin through the rise of a white supremacist wannabe dictatorial president, The Vanishing Half comes out at time where the definition of identity, of race resonates and confounds more than ever in a society that continues to relish in racism like its 1890, Fascism like it's 1938. For as much as it feels we've made steps forward, we're often still rooted into the ugliest soils of our past. So Bennett exploring identity through that past, while pertinent to now, isn't new as her book joins in similar company with the likes of  Charles W. Chestnutt's The House Behind The Cedars, Fannie Hurst's Imitation of Life, Phillip Roth's The Human Stain, Jesse Redmon Fauset's Plum Bun, Danzy Senna's Caucasia, and --- the definitive tome of being a racial chameleon --- Nella Larsen's Passing. 

For that, I was curious on how Bennett would take such weighty topic on. If she could elevate a socialized phenomenon that still retains a lot of mystery and controversy past its stigmas and generalizations, and do so for a 21st Century audience. Certain people made the choice to change their entire race, made the choice to deny every bit of themselves to become not "the other" and form an identity with hopes to shield themselves from rampant racism and conform to a so-called "status quo" --- that's pretty major. So, consider my expectations great, and made greater with this book being at the top of the bestsellers list and the touts of it "echoing" Morrison's best works.

...and um, yeah, maybe I should've lowered expectations as this book was a big 'nah', with a side order of 'meh'.