A new-school “Othello” inwashington, D.C.
Some ideas— the Unicorn Frappuccino, Ryan Seacrest, American government— look better in theory than in practice. Same goes for the Hogarth Shakespeare project, a clever-sounding plan to ask well-known authors to write novels based on the Bard’s plays. The series, which started in 2015 with Jeanette winterson’s revision of “The Winter’s Tale,” has grown to include Howard Jacobson on “Merchant of Venice,” Anne Tyler on “Taming of the Shrew” and Margaret Atwood on “The Tempest.”
Our age is so uniquely fixated on originality that the project feels a bit larcenous— indeed, that’s its appeal. But Elizabethan playwrights didn’t hesitate to steal well-known characters and stories. Ironically, Shakespeare wrote his greatest work by nabbing others’ plots, while these brilliant modern authors have written only middling novels by borrowing his.
Now, we have Tracy Chevalier’s “New Boy.” There’s no risk of it overshadowing Shakespeare’s “Othello” the way “Othello” has completely eclipsed Cinthio’s “A Moorish Captain.” But that’s neither here nor there. What Chevalier has done is recast the play to illuminate the peculiar trials of our era. If it’s not a classic novel, it’s at least a fascinating exercise.
“New Boy” takes place in an elementary school in awashington suburb. At first, that setting might sound infantile for the adult machinations of Shakespeare’s play, but give it amoment, and the anachronisms of this mash-up start to feel oddly appropriate. In Chevalier’s handling, the insidious manipulations of “Othello” translate smoothly to the dynamics of a sixth-grade playground, with all its skinned-knee passions and hopscotch rules. What’smore, that com- mentary works in both directions: The gentlemen of Venice often behave like foolish children; and sixth-graders, as Chevalier makes plain, can be unnervinglymature.
The passage of time is a curious challenge in “Othello,” which seems to hurtle from marriage to murder in a matter of days. But Chevalier makes that procession even more compressed by setting the five parts of “New Boy” in a single school day. It’s one of many adjustments that works surprisingly well. The playground, you may remember, is a field of tempestuous emotions and lightning romances.
The scene opens on a spring day. Dee, the most popular girl in sixth grade, notices the new boy first. The only black student in school, he’s standing apart from the other kids and dressed too formally. Dee is fascinated by his outsider status and immediately feels determined to protect him. Wearing her heart on her sleeve, she introduces herself and learns that he’s from Ghana and that his name is Osei. “It is easier to call me O,” he tells her.
O sparks something else inside others, which allows the novel to explore a spectrum of racial attitudes— from sympathy to fascination to outright revulsion.
But O’s troubles do not come from the teachers and administrators, whose attitudes he can already recognize and negotiate effectively. He knows all about white people and their prejudices, their ignorance of Africa, their creepy desire to touch his hair, their pathetic appropriations of black culture.
What he’s not prepared for is a fellow student like Ian, harboring the greeneyed monster in his adolescent soul.
As a mean-spirited sixth-grader, Ian is more sympathetic than Iago, whose dark motives have been the subject of debate for centuries. Even as we watch Ian inject his poison into O and the rest of the class, we learn that he’s beaten at home and that he’s the youngest of a series of tough brothers. Toxic as he is, it’s apparent that he’s developed a manipulative personality in response to his circumstances.
How Chevalier renders Iago’s scheme into the terms of a modern-day playground provides some wicked delight.