Hair thriller twists and curls — but falls flat
I was excited to start reading Sofi Oksanen’s Norma, and with good reason. Oksanen, an internationally bestselling Finnish-Estonian author ( When the Doves Disappeared; Purge), has won a slew of writing awards including the Prix Femina, the Budapest Grand Prize and the European Book Prize. Norma, published in Finnish in 2015, but only now coming out in English, is billed as “spellbinding,” “a hair-raising thriller.”
Perhaps my expectations were too high, but I didn’t find Norma quite lives up to its billing.
The novel begins enticingly. Norma Ross, 30ish, fiercely private and newly unemployed, has lost the only close connection in her life: her mother, who jumped in front of a train. At the funeral, a stranger named Max confronts her, saying he and her mother once had “some real adventures together,” and suggests he and Norma now have “unpleasant business” to take care of.
Norma senses danger — that is, her hair senses danger. Strangely sensitive to her environment and her emotions, Norma’s supernatural hair twists and undulates of its own accord, especially when peril lurks. Perhaps her mother’s death wasn’t a suicide? She gets a job in the hair salon where her mother worked, which leads her to an international clan dealing in fantastical hair extensions but also much darker commodities, including rent-a-womb tourism and Nigerian baby farms.
Strong feminist themes run throughout. One female salon worker says, “Century after century we’ve given our faces, our hair, our wombs, our breasts, and still the money ends up in men’s pockets.” But like an updo in the rain, the story sags.
Some characters aren’t well developed — I kept getting Marion and Margit mixed up — and the most interesting are the dead ones. Norma herself is so bleak and distant that not even the magical realism of her marvellous hair could make me care deeply about her plight.
The novel has intriguing gothic elements (one character goes mad from rolling up and smoking magical hair), but a thriller it’s not. Norma is an odd sort of hybrid, its important social criticisms only partially seen through a story that, like Norma’s hair, has a few too many tangles. Journalist Marcia Kaye (marciakaye.com) is a frequent contributor to these pages.