Left Wondering

Just before we set off from Melaka yesterday I finished reading Edwidge Danticat's Breath, Eyes, Memory, her first novel and the first by her I've read. I'm now puzzling over what kind of experience it was reading the book. I try to avoid snap judgments on my reading - in fact, to some degree I try to avoid making absolute judgments, especially negative ones - avoiding the unavoidable, as it were. (I'm referring to the fact that our default setting in responding to any creative work seems to be to sit in judgment.) But I've found myself inclined to be dismissive about this novel.

It's not that my experience of reading the novel was entirely negative. I found much to admire. Although I took time to adjust to the narrative initially, a process not helped by my being super-busy when I embarked on my reading, eventually I came to appreciate the pace of the story-telling, in terms of its economy, and the sheer verve of the narrative. There was a spareness about the style I liked, especially as it was allied to an obvious fertility of expression.

But I could not cast off the feeling I was reading a 'woman's novel' in an awkwardly pejorative sense - a novel written for women with women's concerns in mind. Now this is where I enter difficult territory. I'm aware of a distinct weakness in myself in not being able to relate to these real concerns and I know I might well be being simply unfair. Yet I can't shake off the feeling that Danticat deals with her subject matter, or some aspects of it, in a cliched manner; I have this odd sense that she is limited by writing a novel for a partial audience - not exactly women, but women with a definite agenda. I get the same feeling, by the way, reading and teaching Alice Walker's The Color Purple.

By the way, just in case I'm accused of being narrowly sexist (which I might be, I can't quite figure this one out) I should say I've just started a repeat reading of Margaret Atwood's The Handmaid's Tale and I have none of the reservations above about that novel.