Title: Where All Light Tends to Go Author: David Joy
Published: March 3, 2015
Genre(s): Mystery/Thriller
Page Count: 260
Rating:
Summary from Goodreads:The area surrounding Cashiers, North Carolina, is home to people of all kinds, but the world that Jacob McNeely lives in is crueler than most. His father runs a methodically organized meth ring, with local authorities on the dime to turn a blind eye to his dealings. Having dropped out of high school and cut himself off from his peers, Jacob has been working for this father for years, all on the promise that his payday will come eventually. The only joy he finds comes from reuniting with Maggie, his first love, and a girl clearly bound for bigger and better things than their hardscrabble town.
Jacob has always been resigned to play the cards that were dealt him, but when a fatal mistake changes everything, he’s faced with a choice: stay and appease his father, or leave the mountains with the girl he loves. In a place where blood is thicker than water and hope takes a back seat to fate, Jacob wonders if he can muster the strength to rise above the only life he’s ever known.
So, okay. This is a book written by a white Southern man about another white Southern man who does manly stuff like fix cars and help deal his dad’s meth and get rid of anybody who looks like they might squeal to the cops. I get that. Where All Light Tends to Go is a book by a man and about a man. But. That doesn’t give David Joy an excuse for his portrayal of women in this novel, because that portrayal is really, really troublesome. Because, basically, every woman in this book serves a prop to further along the protagonist, Jacob’s, own story. They’re either whores or virgins, they have no personal agency, they only appear to serve Jacob’s (or David Joy’s) purposes. There is no nuance or realism or depth to them.
The women in this book are objects and not people. And, obviously, that pisses me off.
I mean, sure, Where All Light Tends to Go has some great things going for it, but honestly, it’s 2015 and I’m tired of women being relegated to token accessories in stories. No, not every book written has to have female characters, and not every woman in a book has to be a protagonist. But I am really tired of male authors tossing in women that only serve as tools to help the male protagonist complete his story, which is exactly what David Joy has done here. This is insulting and lazy and there’s absolutely no excuse. If you wrote a nuanced secondary male character, why didn’t you write a nuanced secondary female character? No good reason I can think of.
There are really only two women in this book of any significance—which is fine. It’s not the quantity, it’s the quality. There’s Jacob’s mother, the meth addict whose only purpose is to die tragically, and Maggie, the girlfriend he broke up with “for her own good” (don’t even get me started on that trope), we have two women who serve only to spur our protagonist on to action against his father. That is their sole purpose in this book. They’re plot devices.
Joy makes the attempt to be woman-positive with his protagonist, Jacob, but it comes across as extremely half-assed. While Jacob’s dad refers to women as “pussies” and goes on disgusting tirades, Jacob himself thinks about his love for the “pure” Maggie and feels upset that his dad doesn’t respect women. But then if the text seems to back up and support the father’s misogynistic point of view rather than the son’s, what’s the point of all that internal justification? Sure, the author claims that Jacob respects women, but where is that really shown? It isn’t. So, then, Jacob’s claims come across as excuses. “Oh, I really view women as human beings,” he tells the reader, while his actions do nothing to support it.
And, basically, that’s what this book comes down to. Joy has promise as an author (this is only his debut); the story is compelling and his prose is effective. The ending is satisfyingly dark and gruesome. If we take the female characters out of the question, then Where All Light Tends to Go isn’t quite there, but it’s pretty solid. But then you consider the way women are represented, and everything just falls apart.
As a professor of mine said, since the vast majority of people buying books today are women, you had best not write about women as if they’re garbage. More likely than not, they’re the ones putting money in your bank.
