The Meaning of Marylin

True story: Eons ago I had a roommate who decked our whole apartment living area in Marylin Monroe garb --- framed photos, decorative boxes, throw pillows and blankets --- and yet, when you asked her what her favorite Marylin movie* was, she'd draw a blank, blinking stare. Clueless, not conflicted: she had never seen a Marylin Monroe film. In fact, she didn't know much about Marylin beyond the superficial (pretty, white, blonde, and famous). This surface level adulation, the association with my roommate (who was terribleawful in other ways) and her decorative tackiness, along with the onslaught of Marylin's legendary image as THE pinnacle of glamour above all led to me being turned off by the idolization of Marylin Monroe, and even Marylin: The Person to some extent. 

Yeah, I know, Kim there's people that are dying...

For someone who believes variety is the spice of life, the imagery of Marylin while dazzling and iconic, did seem somewhat...typical and too white beauty-centric for me to immerse in --- this knowing she wasn't the only vibrant, glamorous and talented personality to come out of the golden ages of Hollywood history. As a Black woman, I looked to a different, often ignored spectrum as I preferred to celebrate Lena Horne, Diahann Carroll, Diana Sands, Marpessa Dawn, and Dorothy Dandridge (whose life and death have eerie similarities to Marylin...). Women who did the most with the slither of spotlight they were warranted. Women who were also beautiful and talented, and bonus, 'looked' more like me --- their representation mattered more, honestly.

So why did I read a book about Marylin after all this judgement and pettiness? Well, because a) I love diving into a good Hollywood biography/memoir, b) Quarantine binge watching led me to view Lifetime's mini-series The Secret Life of Marylin Monroe, and I felt a lot was missing and wildly fictionalized (I mean, it was on Lifetime...), and c) I wanted to give Marylin --- the woman and the enigma --- a chance to re-introduce herself. 

Let me clarify: I don't dislike Marylin Monroe. Even with the oversaturation of her image, it is without fallacy. She was a beautiful, captivating icon for the ages. Her cotton candied blonde bombshell image, white skirt blown up by hot subway air still haunts and arouses 58 years after her death, remaining a constant in replication, whether to push many a product, personify Hollywood hierarchy or is emulated to imitation from fashion editorials to drag shows. We feel that with Marylin's image around --- if we can slip into it someway --- we're closer to the star spangled fantasy of fame. That if a simple girl named Norma Jean Mortensen could make it, we can too if we just pout our lips, thrust out our busts, and talk breathlessly. Still, nobody has come close to replicating her aura, try as many have. 

Her and James Dean share a similar mythos for their image and tragic short lives, and how they represented this sort of Americana image of youthful success and sexiness, and the tragic pitfalls of it. Unfortunately, Marylin being a woman is scrutinized to a greater degree than James Dean, whose rebellious persona is lauded as ideal masculinity, whilst Marylin is subjected to this "beautiful bimbo blonde" sex object stereotype. It's also why Marylin's misunderstandings are what intrigue me as well, considering how I had my own. 

Marylin was more than just beauty marks, diamonds, mental illness, and the Kennedys, and I wanted to know more beyond the superficial and speculative. I wanted someone to really show me a side to Marylin that I might have overlooked, and misogynistically misunderstood. 

Well, as with a legendary icon, there are lots of sides out there to explore. Zillions upon zillions of books about Marylin exist. Zillions upon zillions of stories, conspiracies and contradictions, observations and opinions about who and what she was also exist. It was difficult to weed through the inaccurate, exploitive, conspiracy riddled, fictitious, and outdated texts to find a book that eschewed such star biography hallmarks, but luckily for me, Charles Casillo's Marylin Monroe: The Private Life of a Public Icon won out as while being a fan, he doesn't stan to where he's skimping on facts and flaws. He offers several viewpoints, none not too flattering or too scathing, making for an informative balance. 

Casillo also avoids framing Marylin's life as "Wikipedia page as a book", where even as linear it is, it's a surprisingly fresh take at her life. The writing is also vibrant and lyrical, never tedious, this even when Casillo is attempting to "armchair analyze" Marylin's thought processes, and give through behind-the-scenes accounts of Marylin's filmography. He places you into the spin of 1950s and 1960s Hollywood and its politics, its dazzle and its difficulties, and how Marylin navigates it to success and tragedy...and it's pretty riveting, thought-provoking stuff. 

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. 

Novella November: Ghachar Ghochar + Aura

Consider me embarrassed as Ghachar Ghochar is my first introduction to South Asian/Indian literature. It shouldn't have been. It won't be my last for sure, but I do kind of wish I had read something a bit more...profound. 

Vivek Shanbhag is a good writer. That above statement isn't a slight to his talent. His sentences are crisp, clean, with no frills, but are plentiful in meaning. Srinath Perura is also a great translator as the translated prose goes down smooth and easy...but that's this book's exact problem: It's too easy. 

There isn't much...here. A family was once poor and then they become rich and the money ruins them --- everything becomes ghachar ghochar: a tangled mess. Money can't buy it. Money's too tight to mention. Money changes everything. Mo' money mo' problems. I have heard all the songs, thus there isn't anything enlightening, or arresting about this family's downfall, it was just the inevitable.

"It's true what they say--it's not we who control money, it's the money that controls us. When there's only a little, it behaves meekly; when it grows, it becomes brash and has its way with us. Money had swept us up and flung us in the midst of a whirlwind."

Interest lies in the narration, this done by the loafer son. He's neither hero or voice of reason, and it's a quiet, bold choice for Shanbhag as this unnamed manchild (what is with me reading books with nameless characters this year?) isn't likeable in the slightest, and yes, that must be the point. He is observant in how his family has devolved, but nonchalant and self-victimizing in the tell. He wanders and lays about, has a "job" in the family's spice business but it's only a baseless title, as he never works for the hefty paycheck he receives like clockwork in his bank account. His sister is a selfish temperamental snob. His mother a blind loyalist to the shift of dynamics, with fears she'll be encroached upon by whatever woman her son or brother-in-law bring into the home. His father morphs from a hard-working provider to a standby mute. As they become shells of themselves, they all orbit around the ambitious, borderline autocratic uncle whose questionable business practices have gifted them this lush life --- and they dare not question it for fear of losing their newfound wealth. <--- The characters are there, but they don't evolve beyond this and feel predictable. Happy and supportive when poor, apathetic and amoral when rich. No shading, no surprises. Honestly, the family didn't seem that wholesome and devoted even while poor, so the impact of their greed wasn't jarring to me. 

There's an additional whiff of sexism that wafts in the text that didn't sit right with me. The intrusion of our narrator's wife, Anita, a liberated woman disrupts the family dynamic with her "quaint" middle-class ideals, and headstrong, yet empathetic personality. While she's painted as an disagreeable outsider by our narrator, she's actually the character I agreed with the most (#nastywomenunite). Not sure if Shanbhag is flexing realism within the fictitious or making himself a stand-in for his narrator (I always expect the latter when the character is mysteriously ~unnamed~), but there are some cringing dialogue that volleys between the family that is quite chauvinistic and bizarre, especially a really weird conversation about justifying men murdering their wives. Yeah... I'm not well-versed on the treatment of women in Indian culture, but since shitty men come in all colors, creeds and nationalities, I can deduce within the book's world, women are considered second class and a nuisance, especially to our pissbaby narrator.

Flipping that argument is how Shanbhag ascribes a double standard when it comes to our narrator's marriage to Anita. First it's a little...funny our narrator disparages strong women, this while he chooses Anita for a wife, this as she seems to be of independent mind and purpose, traits and drive he lacks. His interest in marriage is also...funny, as he's much more eager to get married to Anita than she is to him, which is quite the switch of gender dynamics. In a way, our narrator is emasculated from both sides, by his 'feminist' wife and by his moneyed uncle, and that's why this book is almost a lengthy complaint of this realization. <---Fascinating sketch there, but for how slim this book is, it doesn't feel satisfying or harbors much depth. And that ending? Oof. So unfulfilled.

All while reading I kept thinking that there was something missing, and that maybe this would be one of the few times I felt a novella needed more pages, more subplots, more depth. This book just lacks a point, or rather a unique outlook. Sure money corrupts, sure money is the root of all evil, sure mo' money breeds mo' problems...and what? This book is too flimsy to be a morality tale, as it ends up being no more than an elaborate synopsis. Disappointing.

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"What is Aura expecting of you? What does she want, what does she want?"

I'm wondering that still after reading. What is Aura, Carlos Fuentes' most well-known, celebrated story expecting of me? What does it want? --- and maybe the questions lingering is the point. 1962 knocked back this quick drink of Gothic horror that broke ground for its warped magical realist imagery and just plain weirdness. Some decades and even weirder horror stories and films later, it has lost its luster a touch. Just a touch...

For Fuentes' aromatic and engaging writing, Aura is disjointed --- appropriately so. It has the feel of entering an opaque, congested nightmare, where it strips the fear to its naked core and breeds doubt and confusion. Told in the second person --- to where I got the nostalgic feels of it being a Choose Your Own Adventure tale --- but "we" are supposed to be Felipe Montero, a young historian who is lured by an job advertisement that seems destined for him. The advertisement leads him to the doorstep of Consuelo Llorente, a spectral, aging widow who wants Montero to organize, transcribe, and publish the memoirs of her deceased husband, General Llorente, this before she dies. Montero has some apprehension about the job till his eyes meet the magnetic green ones of Aura, Consuelo's niece, whom becomes Montero's focus of desire as much as the catalyst for his destiny. To say more would ruin the twisted trip this short novel draws one into. 

If I could go back, I'd have carved out time in my insomniac hours to read this straight through, as this story demands that you're about as delirious and woozy as the prose itself. Reading a chapter daily, I suppressed a lot of dread and suspense, leading me to feel a bit lukewarm about the whole ordeal. Still there was a lot of weirdness to go around to unmoor me during my readings: There is a red-eyed rabbit named Saga, scuttling rats and screeching unseen cats, thick, heady foliage that shrouds the perception and senses --- you have no exact grounding of where you're at that is unsettling. 

Consuelo has a Miss Havisham vibe about her, her lounging in her bed, drifting around her home, and dancing with her dead husband's military uniform was some chilling character imagery. The collision course of the past intruding into the present, blurring the distinction of the two is a special kind of terror that I particular enjoy. For all its talks of it being 'magic realism', Aura has more in common with the crumbling mansions by the moors in 19th Century Gothic romances and Lovecraftian grotesque theater, than the usual surrealistic pillows Latin literature offers, but that's just me.

Still, for me, there was *too much* going on. Cats, goats, rodents, a Voodoo doll even shows up under a dinner plate...its a exhaustive mosaic of people, animals, plants, hallways, rooms, lights, colors, objects --- of course all colliding together to stoke the eeriness --- but it lent things to become too abstract in a way that left me questioning where Fuentes was going with this and if he had made an oops by overstuffing his narrative with every horror trope known.

...then again (and once again) that's probably the point, to be unsettled, disoriented and confined in this batshit macabre nightmare, and nothing more. Not sure if I really enjoyed the journey Aura took me on, but the writing and the weirdness made this still a worthwhile read.

The Memory Police

"My memories don't feel as though they’ve been pulled up by the root. Even if they fade, something remains. Like tiny seeds that might germinate again if the rain falls. And even if a memory disappears completely, the heart retains something. A slight tremor or pain, some bit of joy, a tear."

Imagine waking up and discovering your loved ones, the necessities, and freedoms of day-to-day living have vanished, one by one. Where sustenance becomes scarce, the conditions of living have devolved into a frigid, hollowed squalor, and where the protesting of such vanishings proves impossible due to your lack of remembrance of them ever existing. It in itself is difficult to fathom, but it's the life on an unnamed island where an oppressive regime has held its occupants and their memories hostage. Yoko Ogawa has created this barren totalitarian alter-verse in The Memory Police, where a young writer copes with a vacant livelihood and loved ones she can't recollect, this all as the world slips away. 

While attempting to regain a sense of herself within her writings, out unnamed narrator lives life in a limbo of fear and indifference. Fear is in the form of the shadowy Memory Police, a militarized force that dictates what is to be disposed, and erased from conscious in order to maintain control of the island's citizens. Those that thwart the disposal of, or resist to fall in line with the memory erasure are whisked away to never be seen again --- this a fate our nameless narrator's parents have endured. Indifference follows once these particular items --- whether its roses, birds, photographs or perfume --- are disposed or destroyed. Our narrator is aware of the absences of particular items, and can "feel" their absences upon waking up, but once the disposal or disappearance of such is gone, her concern, and sympathies about the losses ceases.

With haunting and understated pacing, The Memory Police draws a fascinating premise, as its world mirrors the real-life autocratic police-state regimes in North Korea and Russia, as much as arouses thoughtful 'cautionary' dialogue for Westerners about the preciousness of memory, and the dangers of censorship and corrupt surveillance operations. With these kinds of books we're always wondering how individuals can become ensnared in such a suppressive environment, and The Memory Police provides a horrible world that teeters away from fiction into reality, but somewhere down the line it becomes tangled up in its own philosophy and leaves with more questions than answers. 

The Collector

"I know what I am to him. A butterfly he has always wanted to catch." 

With the onslaught of formulaic TV crime procedurals these days, I had to read this book with a different frame of mind. I even had to expel a bit of what I remember about the (excellent) 1965 William Wyler-directed film, starring Terence Stamp and Samantha Eggar, because as much as the film is chilling and influenced future twisted thrillers (here's looking at you, Silence of the Lambs and Misery...) it only peeled back just a few of the layers John Fowles' cleverly constructed in the pages of his debut novel. 

The Collector is a psychological suspense thriller, and depending on your opinion, the first of its kind. It involves a butterfly collecting sociopath who after winning the football pools decides to put his winnings into remodeling a countryside manor so he can kidnap and 'collect' a young woman he's been obsessed with. Since such a storyline is blurred between fiction and fact these days, The Collector by summary feels a tad less compelling, but even when I knew every turn I still managed to feel unsettled, engaged, and even conflicted while reading. There was something so stirringly captivating about Fowles pitting these two characters in this disturbing power struggle, becoming audience to how they both perceive their situation, and how complex it all was.

For the first part, you go inside the warped mind of Fredrick Clegg as he stalks and then prepares to kidnap the object of his obsession, a young art student named Miranda Grey. From Fredrick's perspective, you view Miranda as a difficulty, and you oddly start to victim blame, because well, Fredrick comes off being oh so "nice". He's fixing fancy meals, he's bought Miranda everything her heart's desire, and he's made a nice comfortable spot for her in a cellar surrounded by books and painting tools. He even states he only wants her as his "guest". The internal dialogue has you almost sympathizing with Fredrick (yeah, gross I know), as he comes off as this lonely and socially awkward guy who is looking for a friend, and just goes about it in the most ineptest way imaginable.

But the record scratch of reality comes in the middle as the narrative switches gears and we become privy of Miranda's thoughts through a secret diary she keeps between the mattress. At first this transition was jarring, and since she recounts most of everything you have read for the last 100 pages it all seems like a bad literary decision, but it's not, in fact it's a brilliant turn of character building. Miranda is now not bound and gagged by her captor, she is 'free' to speak her mind in her secret diary and we begin to understand the claustrophobic nightmare she is desperately trying to claw out of. From these pages, we learn that Miranda is quite intelligent and resourceful as she tries to figure out ways to best Fredrick, submitting to and resisting him all for the sake of survival. It's devastating to read how she slowly realizes just how insane Fredrick is and how day-by-day she becomes less of a human in his eyes, but more of an inanimate object that is only to be admired, likened to his framed butterflies. 

"I’m meant to be dead, pinned, always the same, always beautiful. He knows that part of my beauty is being alive, but it’s the dead me he wants. He wants me living-but-dead."  

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'. 

Devil's In The Details

This is no dream, she thought, this is really happening...

Ira Levin isn't concerned about taking things at face value, about what's on the outside, on the surface. His forte is what's skittering, squirming underneath the mask of human nature. Rosemary's Baby is notorious for its Satanism motifs, it being the definitive tale of woman becoming impregnated by Satan himself, but between the lines the real horror isn't the devil --- no, that's to stir the curiosity --- the real horror is the shattering of seemingly docile domesticity. Where the quiet muffles screams. Where the ordinary reveals its odious odor. 

Levin is so good at this, masterful even. After reading The Stepford Wives and The Boys From Brazil, I became enamored over his knack for shattering the sense of so-called "normalcy". Nothing is "normal", there isn't such a word, a feeling, and I like that Levin is blunt about that as he wriggles a little subtext into the mix. Little warnings to not trust that a neat suburban neighborhood is tranquil, or that just because Hitler is dead that right-wing Nazism can't be resurrected in his Führer's image. "Horror" as genre isn't associated with Levin, and even the man himself didn't ascribe to being a practitioner of the genre, but I do think he taps into a realistic, naked horror that explores the enduring nature of evil within ordinary settings, the type that can't be considered terrifying at first glance --- well, that is depending on what one considers terrifying. 

I'm late to the devil baby party of Rosemary's Baby. A paperback has lounged about my house for years (and wouldn't you know it goes MIA when I want to read it most...), and the book isn't out of print, or difficult to find, just that I admit after partaking in super famous film adaptions first and hearing things such as "this movie is EXACTLY like the book" (see The Shawshank Redemption), that I tend to ignore the source material. I know. I suck. It pains me to even type that I have such a reflex, but Roman Polanski's 1968 film adaptation made such a deep impression on me over the years, to where reading the text felt...redundant.

For me, Rosemary's Baby as a film is ingenious and intriguing for its details. Those tiny, blink-and-you-might-miss-them details that are sprinkled throughout retain a delicious sense of unsettling ambiguity. Polanski is a terrible person (and the gross irony of him directing a film about a woman's rape isn't lost on me...), but he crafted a classic blueprint for domestic horror with this film (...and we will dare not speak of the dismal 1976 TV sequel, Look What Happened To Rosemary's Baby or the even more ill-advised 're-imagined' 2014 miniseries). It raised the bar on taking horror films from the b-movie mire into the mainstream and approaching them from a more psychological perspective where the details mattered. Details that would take on larger, more unnerving forms and meanings of uncertainty to where, by film's end, everything is not what it appears to be --- while being exactly what it appears to be.

I never watch this movie the same way as I did before. I'm always finding something new that I missed, some little quote spoken that takes on new meaning or those fine-tuned little visual details that spring up to change my perspective or question others motives. I know every twist and turn, and of course, the doomed outcome, but it still feels fresh with each viewing, and never am I not trying to warn Rosemary to get away from those meddling neighbors and that shifty-eyed husband of hers. I'm also never not chilled over the fact that a woman's pregnancy --- something that is supposed to be intimate and innocent --- is turned into something so perverse and terrorizing. 

Still, without Levin's wonderful text, his attention to every detail from the start, there wouldn't have been this brilliant film affair. Polanski studied Levin's text to the letter to where character ticks, whole dialogues, and even the food that is consumed is replicated on film. It's about as faithful as an adaptation as you'll get, a film that complements the book, extending the terror it has laid bare. The genius Levin flexes in text, (and I repeat) shows that that everything is not what it appears to be, but then sentence by sentence, detail by detail, everything is exactly what it appears to be --- and then the rug is yanked beneath our once stable conscious.

Out of the Mouths of Babes...

Before A Confederacy of Dunces, a 16-year-old John Kennedy Toole wrote The Neon Bible, a quiet, but crisply intense bidungsroman about a young boy growing up in a claustrophobic Mississippi town thick with prejudice and religious discord during World War II. Upon finishing the story, Toole viewed the work as juvenile, and filed it away. Decades later, and after Toole posthumously won a Pulitzer Prize for A Confederacy of Dunces in 1984, fans of the work and the curious inquired about the possibility of other misbegotten Toole works, with Toole's mother happy to oblige with a work she had discovered among her late son's effects. As W. Kenneth Holditch recounts in the introduction, Toole's mother was determined to have it published to share more of her son's genius, and after some legal tussles and qualms among the Toole family, The Neon Bible saw publication in 1989. Yet, for all the fuss and legal red tape cut to get it published, The Neon Bible skipped the fanfare of accolades and awards that showered Dunces, finding itself once again filed away and forgotten, save for a 1995 Terence Davies-directed film adaptation that too is overlooked these days. 

Usually I approach books written by young authors with some skepticism, but largely pass on reading works that an author never finished, or didn't allow permission to be published. There is something rather...intrusive, lacking about reading incomplete thoughts, ideas, or words that the author wanted to keep private for the sake of their craft. It's why I took some slight delight at people getting pissed about the content of Harper Lee's Go Set A Watchman, as with its controversial publication, reader's discovered their beloved "civil rights hero" lawyer Attitcus Finch was "shockingly" revealed as a racist. Sometimes you just don't poke the bear... Toole didn't want The Neon Bible published as he wrote it as a teen and felt the work naive, and as a young writer myself (who has a persistent fear of my own crappy drafts and word vomits being published without my permission), I tend to respect that. 

Well...until I ate my words, poked the bear, and was rewarded with reading one of the best, and most haunting, melancholic meditations concerning the tightrope walk from adolescence to adulthood.