Gingerbread goes fact-free
In her newest novel, author bites the head off a post-truth world, spiked with surprise
Picture Oscar Wilde a-twirl in a Kate Bush video, and you might get something close to the spirit of Helen Oyeyemi. Her books are mash-ups of reality and fairy tale, electric with sharp, lightly delivered insight. In her latest novel,
Gingerbread, she continues to combine ingredients in the most startling ways. And she’s certainly hit her stride in the post-truth era.
Mother and daughter Margot and Harriet Lee are refugees from Druhástrana, a country that has decided to exit (Drexit?) the rest of the world. They end up in the U.K. among rich family members determined to wring gratitude from them, and eventually flee to London, where Harriet’s own teenage daughter, Perdita, slips into a coma that takes her to the motherland. When she wakes, they make a deal: “Perdita will tell Harriet how she got to Druhástrana, and Harriet will tell Perdita how she left it.”
The deal doesn’t entirely work out, like many in this book. Druhástrana is a sclerotic bureaucratic place, run by “theoretical persons.” Workers trundle along in full hope of winning the lottery, able to live “under the most dire privations as long as there’s a chance, however irrational, that (they) could someday stumble upon some abundance that’s accompanied by the right to keep it all.” The parallels with Donald Trump’s America are clear. Wealth wins, and truth is what the powerful make it. The country’s motto is “Never wounded, never wrong.”
The U.K., when the Lees arrive, isn’t much different. Harriet spots falseness everywhere, exclaiming, “Trickery occurs all the time … people spend their life savings on lies.” And Margot, working three jobs for a “minimum franken wage,” struggles with a belligerent client: “How on Earth could she make someone who believed there are too many foreigners in his country feel secure?”
As painfully real as all of this feels, and though its structure takes some time to sink into, the novel keeps up its weirdly funny momentum. Harriet’s stint as a gingerbread girl, shilling faux-nostalgic childhood experiences to Druhástra- nians, is one of these wincingly hilarious episodes. Later, gingerbread becomes Harriet’s currency, constantly on offer to unwilling members of the Parental Power Association at Perdita’s school. It’s impossible to join the slick in-group, but Harriet doesn’t give up trying to build a real home and real closeness. She can make her gingerbread gluten-free, for one.
She also has her childhood friend Gretel — yes, that Gretel — for advice. As in the original fairy tale, innocence is corrupted, generations battle it out, and evil doesn’t go down without a fight. Harriet and Gretel have agreed to meet again when they grow up, but the novel doesn’t think much of growing up generally, throwing in talking dolls and houses with minds of their own. Reality’s dull cruelties are spiked with surprise and delight: the trademark Oyeyemi dish. Alix Hawley’s latest book is My Name Is A Knife.