4 minute read
THE WORLD WE MAKE by N.K. Jemisin
the world we make
THE WORLD WE MAKE
Jemisin, N.K. Orbit (448 pp.) $27.00 | Nov. 1, 2022 978-0-316-50989-3
In this follow-up to The City We Became (2020), the human avatars of New York City battle an extradimensional threat to the multiverse. As New York attempts to persuade the other living cities of the world to join them in the fight for all humanity against R’lyeh, the alien city housing genocidal Lovecraft-ian horrors and represented by the sinister Woman in White, the city’s avatars confront new challenges. Padmini, the avatar of Queens, faces deportation to India. Savvy city councilwoman Brooklyn campaigns for mayor against Sen. Panfilo, a xenophobic White man who promises to bring New York back to traditional values—he’s secretly supported by the Woman in White and publicly defended by a band of violent skinheads. Manny is being pressured by his powerful family to abandon his role as Manhattan’s avatar and become the emerging city of Chicago’s primary avatar instead, a decision that would also mean abandoning New York’s primary avatar, Neek, with whom Manny is in love. Meanwhile, Aislyn, Staten Island’s avatar, discovers the downsides of turning her back on the rest of the city and allying herself with the Woman in White. As in the previous book, this is a fantasy inspired by the very real division between those who embrace difference (and are only intolerant of intolerance) and those who seek a creativity-killing homogeneity, seeing it as a return to a supposedly moral past that never existed. The story also explores how perceptions about a place imposed on it by outsiders—who have only the most distorted views about it from popular culture—can have genuinely damaging effects. It’s cathartic to imagine fighting these slippery, inimical forces with magic, to believe for a moment that some complex problems have direct solutions—that passion, faith, and the will to fight can make miracles happen. Perhaps the possibility of confronting those problems head-on might serve as inspiration for all of us facing variants of this issue in the real world and help us model ourselves after Jemisin’s characterization of New Yorkers: tough, nasty, but ultimately kind people who defend their own while embracing newcomers into their midst.
A ray of hope in a dark time. (This review is printed here for the first time.)
THE BIRDCATCHER
Jones, Gayl Beacon Press (216 pp.) $24.95 | Sept. 13, 2022 978-080-702994-7
A drolly insinuating chamber piece about a trio of Black American expatriates. First published in Germany in 1986, this novel would be considered an anomaly for almost anybody except Jones, whose legendary stature among African American novelists was established almost 50 years ago by such provocative inquiries into Black women’s psyches as Corregidora (1975) and Eva’s Man (1976). Her new spate of publications that began last year with the historical epic Palmares continues with this predictably unpredictable firstperson account by Amanda Wordlaw (“Wonderful name for a writer, isn’t it?”), a lapsed author of racy novels like The Other Broad’s Story who has forsaken writing fiction for travel books. As the novel opens, she is living on “the white-washed island of Ibiza” with her longtime friend Catherine Shuger, a prominent sculptor, and Catherine’s husband, Ernest, who writes articles for popular science magazines. Amanda wastes no time telling you what’s whack about two-thirds of this triad: Catherine keeps trying to kill Ernest, who in turns puts her into an asylum, from which she is released by Ernest, whom she tries to kill again. And again. It’s all outrageous enough at the outset to make readers anticipate an absurdist-modernist slapstick farce. Yet the icy, deadpan tone of Amanda’s leisurely narrative voice, though seasoned with sneaky wordplay and impish irony, helps make this a quirkier, more reflective kind of comedy. The repartee, as with the rest of the story, can drift and meld into side tangents and back, complete with literary references, art criticism, and coy innuendo. Jones’ impulse to keep her readers alternately off balance and in the weeds threatens to upend the novel altogether, especially at the end, as shifts in tone and locale make you question almost everything that came before. Whether this was intended or not, its effect seems perfunctory, even abrupt. It may not be the most powerful or best realized of Jones’ novels, but it may be the closest she’s come to making us laugh as much as wince. Her vaunted blend of ambiguity and disquiet comes across here as a sly, even smirky dance. And her inquiries into how Black women live now are present throughout. Not just “present,” in fact, but “prescient,” as Amanda herself likely couldn’t keep herself from saying.
