Lolita's Ghost Speaks

"I just really need it to be a love story. You know? I really, really need it to be that. Because if it isn't a love story, then what is it?"

23. This is the exact number of years that Harvey Weinstein, notorious Hollywood producer and all-around predatory creep, received for sexual abuse in the New York courts. Years. Not months. Years. What does this mean? As the celebratory confetti swirled, this question lingers. Have we reached that watershed moment of taking abusers, even the highest, the whitest, the most financially secured to task? Clarifying what consent is? Are we even going forward? (Over 70 million voting for an orange sexual assaulter and serial rapist shitbag to occupy the White House means we're still stuck in the ditch...). 

Weinstein's and Bill Cosby's convictions, the Jeffery Epstein/Ghislaine Maxwell unraveling, the judicial victory of E. Jean Carroll's sexual asssault suit against Agolf Shitler, the ferocious surge of the #MeToo movements telegraph a sociopolitical sea change this as we enter into a new decade and contest with the now opened Pandora's box as more victims are finding their voices, wielding the weapon of words to strive for accountability and truth.

My Dark Vanessa adds its voice to a stream of fiction that attempts bring context to our current cultural response to sexual violence, but it takes on a language that is raw and realist, rather than veiled and implied. Its wealth of pages explores the complexities of sexual abuse --- the gaslighting and accusations that encompass it, the trauma that endures from it, and the persons who become ensnared in its insidious manipulative rhythm. For her debut, Kate Elizabeth Russell has drawn one sinister account of a young girl's abuse, and how this abuse continues to defile and define her into adulthood. As a whole, this book is disturbing, devastating, and stirs disgust, and sadly it doesn't offer solutions, or solace. More so it's a reminder of what silences, denials we're still facing today and how rot-rooted sex abuse is within our society, and how the truth is the only antidote to combating against it. Many an emotion was had by reading this, and I can't say it was enjoyable, we're viewing a woman's dissent into the quagmire of her past, and its a wretched way down. 

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...

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'.