THE CONFUSED AND CONFUSING BOOK OUR AGE DESERVES
A big, busy novel about new ways of living
Bernardine Evaristo’s eighth work of fiction, Girl, Woman, Other, shared the Booker Prize this year with Margaret Atwood’s The Testaments, a sequel to The Handmaid’s Tale. These novels are linked for posterity now, like conjoined siblings.
Was this split decision a dereliction of duty on the jury’s part or is more the merrier? Two Nobel Prizes in literature were distributed this year as well, for a different reason. (The gold medal, diploma and check were withheld last year because of sexual harassment and corruption in the academy.)
Perhaps this is a health-giving direction. Iris Murdoch, in 1967, wanted The Beatles to be jointly named Poets Laureate in England. After scanning cable news most nights, I’d hardly be averse to voting for the cast of Oklahoma! for president in 2020.
Girl, Woman, Other is a big, busy novel with a large root system. The characters start to arrive (Amma, Yazz, Dominique, Carole, Bummi and LaTisha) and they keep arriving (Shirley, Winsome, Penelope, Megan/Morgan, Hattie and Grace). Everyone should be provided with a latte and a nametag.
We meet these characters’ friends and sometimes their families, too. Lorrie Moore has written that Ann Beattie’s fiction is a valentine to friendships. The same is true of Evaristo’s. This novel is a densely populated village where everyone leans on one another in order to scrape by.
The primary character is probably Amma, a black lesbian playwright, now in her 50s, whose new play is being produced at the National Theatre in London. Success has taken her out of range of some of her old anxieties about life and put her in range of awkward new ones.
After a life spent on the margins, criticising the centre of the culture, is Amma selling out? If privilege is the original sin of wokeness, what happens when you accumulate privilege yourself?
This slice of the story is semi-autobiographical. Amma founds a theatre company with a friend. Evaristo was co-founder, with two other women, of the Theatre of Black Women in the early 1980s.
Amma’s story is followed by 11 others that drift back and forth in time. One character, Carole, attends Oxford
(she complains about the “revolting Stone Age food”) and becomes an investment banker. Another, Hattie, is 93 and lives on a farm in Northern England. Still others are young and live in contemporary London.
This polyphonic novel, packed with interconnected stories, is similar in some ways to the monologues in Ntozake Shange’s For Colored Girls Who Have Considered Suicide/When The Rainbow Is Enuf. It may also remind some readers of Alison Bechdel’s warm and sophisticated comic strip Dykes To Watch Out For.
Like that comic, Girl, Woman, Other presents a landscape of abiding multicultural sensitivity. Evaristo’s dedication sets the tone: “For the sisters & the sistas & the sistahs & the sistren & the women & the womxn & the wimmin & the womyn & our brethren & our bredrin & our brothers & our bruvs & our men & our mandem & the LGBTQI+ members of the human family.”
This dedication will prompt many readers of my acquaintance to rush inside and just as many others to flee in the opposite direction. A few, like squirrels on two-lane blacktop, will lose all composure and become roadkill.
A reason to stick around: Like Bechdel, Evaristo has a gift for appraising the lives of her characters with sympathy and grace while gently skewering some of their pretensions. When you are feeling your way into new ways of living, she understands, there must be room for error.
Carole keeps Vivaldi’s Four Seasons as her ringtone because she wants to appear classy and repeats a morning mantra: “I am highly presentable, likeable, clubbable, relatable, promotable and successful.”
Dominique dates an American woman named Nzinga, a “radical feminist separatist lesbian housebuilder” with epic dreadlocks and a “swamp-divavoodoo-queen” vibe, only to discover that her real name is Cindy. Cindy is tough; she aims her cultural commentary as if into a spittoon. She’s even tougher on Dominique. Escape will be necessary.
Girl, Woman, Other is written in a hybrid form that falls somewhere between prose and poetry. Evaristo’s lines are long, like Walt Whitman’s or Allen Ginsberg’s, and there are no periods at the ends of them.
There’s a looseness to her tone that gives this novel its buoyancy. Evaristo’s wit helps, too. Yazz describes herself as “part 90s Goth, part post-hip-hop, part slutty ho, part alien”. We learn how useful a hijab can be when you want to have a hands-free phone conversation.
This looseness can detract as well. There is sometimes the sense that Evaristo loves all of her sentences a little bit but few of them quite enough. This essentially plotless novel grows longer, but it does not always appear to grow richer.
There comes a point in this narrative where you’d rather settle into the characters you’ve met than be introduced to still more new ones. You begin to feel you are always between terminals at a very large airport, your clothes and toiletries in a little wheelie suitcase behind you. It’s possible to admire this deeply humane novel while permitting your enthusiasm to remain under control.
A lot of human experience is packed into Girl,
Woman, Other. Penelope, who hasn’t had sex in ages, thinks to herself: “It had been a long time since she’d been seen in a state of undress by anyone other than the matronly bra-fitter at Marks & Spencer.”
Dominique worries that her penchant for sleeping with blonde women means that she’s been brainwashed by a beauty ideal. Amma turns around in her mind the implied whiteness of a British accent.
Amma’s play opens at the National. Dominique greets her backstage and says that “afro-gynocentri-cism caused a femquake tonight”. The ground rattles further for another character when she gets the results of a mail-order DNA test.
Identity — artistic, cultural, familial — is slippery in Girl, Woman, Other. Yazz gets a surprise when she opens a drawer under her father’s bed. It’s a surprise she deserves. She thinks: “You never know people until you’ve been through their drawers / and computer history.”