‘Brown Girls’ gives voice to the living and the dead
“Anovel virus.” “Wait, like a book?” That snippet of dialogue arrives near the end of “Brown Girls,” Daphne Palasi Andreades’ brash and talky first novel. She’s about to kill off her characters, one by one.
The virus nixes a few. Others are “caught in riptides, hit-and-runs, beneath ACs that fall.” Still others slit their wrists or leap from bridges. Some die from “heart attacks, cancers, aneurysms.” For some, the thief is simple old age.
This isn’t a disaster novel. By the end of “Brown Girls,” the women in it have led long and mostly agreeable lives. By beginning this review with their demises, I haven’t planted a spoiler. (Or not much more of a spoiler than you’d deliver by approaching a stranger reading a biography on a park bench, leaning in conspiratorially and whispering, “She dies in the end.”)
Who are these women we’re talking about anyway? Andreades’ novel has a collective narrator, as did Jeffrey Eugenides’ novel “The Virgin Suicides” and Gwendolyn Brooks’ poem “We Real Cool.”
Sometimes it seems like Andreades is talking about a handful of particular women: “brown girls” who grew up together in an outer borough of New York City. At other times, audaciously, it’s as if she’s talking about every brown girl alive during the past century.
What matters in this novel isn’t that they die but how much life the author pumps into them while they’re here.
“Brown Girls” achieves immediate liftoff. “We live in the dregs of Queens, New York,” the novel begins, “where airplanes fly so low that we are certain they will crush us.”
Two pages later:
“If you really want to know, we are the color of 7-Eleven root beer. The color of sand at Rockaway Beach when it blisters the bottoms of our feet. Color of soil. Color of the charcoal pencils our sisters use to rim their eyes. Color of grilled hamburger patties. Color of our mother’s darkest thread, which she loops through the needle.”
It’s a treat, always, to read language that’s excited about itself. You wonder if Andreades will be able to keep it up over the course of a novel. If she doesn’t, not quite, she comes close enough that she has put herself immediately on the radar screen.
We first meet the characters in “Brown Girls” — Nadira, Priya, Beatriz, Usha and others — when they’re young. They live in brick apartment buildings. Their mothers clean houses. The girls use their sisters’ handed-down cellphones.
Years pass. Some go to local high schools. Others end up at conservatories like Juilliard, which means spending “four years of our lives rolling our eyes at dance majors pirouetting atop lunch tables.” They learn the New York City subway lines “as if they are the very veins that run through our bodies.”
Some date wealthy white boys, who have it all and deserve little of it. Andreades dryly, and deftly, sets up the conversations that ensue.
At dinner with one boy’s parents, the narrator says: “We suddenly become Ambassadors of Third World Nations. Their fathers and mothers ask: What do you think is the root cause of poverty in your country?” And: “What do you think of NAFTA?”
“Brown girls, brown girls, brown girls,” the author likes to repeat. She uses these repetitions for effect, relishing the words the way Chris Rock does in his comedy, pacing the stage.
More years pass. Some girls attend the sorts of colleges where “even the garbage cans shine.” Others worry: Are they fundamentally doctors, or are they nurses? Back home, many of their brothers are dealing drugs. A lot of the people they know remain in the country illegally.
Andreades follows her cohort into their careers, marriages, affairs and divorces, and into old age. Along the way, a lot of subjects are turned over for examination. Like a DJ, the author picks up the needle and puts it back down in unexpected places.
In “Brown Girls,” nostalgia is complicated. The women go back to Queens to visit, and a landslide of memories rush in: “This is where I chased an ice cream truck for five freaking blocks,” says
Edel; Lisa confesses, “I ran away from my mom on a day like this”; “At this intersection,” says Dee, “I saw a girl get run over by a bus.”
For a lot of them, for 1,000 psychosociological reasons, going home is impossible.
Andreades’ writing has economy and freshness. “Brown Girls” reads as much like poetry as it does like a novel, which is another way of saying: Don’t arrive here expecting a good deal of plot.
The chapters are short, ramekin-size. The novel always seems to be stopping and starting over.
This quality can relieve Andreades of doing the hard work of exploring character, or ideas, in real depth.
Some of these brown girls marry white boys, and they’re conflicted about it. In bars, later in life, they stare at brown men. “Write our numbers on napkins. Leave, trembling.”
Virginia Woolf referred to death as “the one experience I shall never describe.” Andreades follows her characters right into the afterlife. We slide down behind them, as if on a chute.
Death! It tastes like feces, she writes, and also like “water purified by gravel in the Loire.” It’s somehow in keeping with this fearless novel that tasting notes are provided.