Happy Tuesday! Here are some short(ish) thoughts on three litfic novels I’ve read in the past few weeks. To be quite clear: these aren’t really “reviews” and are rather some observations—one of these is literally a brief manifesto on why I don’t think the book should have been written at all. Apologies that these aren’t terribly coherent; I’ve been having a rotten January and the part of my brain that can say intelligent things about highbrow literature is struggling mightily.
And with that promising into, here’re the reviews!
Title: Sharks in the Time of Saviors Author: Kawai Strong Washburn
Published: March 3, 2020
Genre(s): Literary Fiction
Page Count: 376
Rating:
Summary from Goodreads:In 1995 Kailua-Kona, Hawaii, on a rare family vacation, seven-year-old Nainoa Flores falls overboard a cruise ship into the Pacific Ocean. When a shiver of sharks appears in the water, everyone fears for the worst. But instead, Noa is gingerly delivered to his mother in the jaws of a shark, marking his story as the stuff of legends.
Nainoa's family, struggling amidst the collapse of the sugarcane industry, hails his rescue as a sign of favor from ancient Hawaiian gods—a belief that appears validated after he exhibits puzzling new abilities. But as time passes, this supposed divine favor begins to drive the family apart: Nainoa, working now as a paramedic on the streets of Portland, struggles to fathom the full measure of his expanding abilities; further north in Washington, his older brother Dean hurtles into the world of elite college athletics, obsessed with wealth and fame; while in California, risk-obsessed younger sister Kaui navigates an unforgiving academic workload in an attempt to forge her independence from the family's legacy.
When supernatural events revisit the Flores family in Hawaii—with tragic consequences—they are all forced to reckon with the bonds of family, the meaning of heritage, and the cost of survival.
In the Acknowledgements to Sharks in the Time of Saviors, Washburn credits “those who came first…the artists of the islands who preserve and amplify the truth of our land.” Our land, he writes. A claim of possession, of identity. Except…Washburn is not native Hawaiian. Rather, his parents (one white, one Black) settled in Hawaii after attending college there. The author’s claims of ownership overthe Hawaiian islands are born out of heritage as a child of these settlers. He says the land belongs to him, but does it truly?
This is particularly important because Sharks is a book that is about being Hawaiian. It isn’t a story merely set in the islands, nor is it a story that features native Hawaiian characters but focuses on other things as the main thrust of its narrative focus. No. This book is about the unique experience of being a native Hawaiian, about the specific culture and mythology of Hawaiians. And I think it is the height of arrogance that Washburn thought he, simply because of his status as a Hawaii resident, was entitled to speak about the lived experiences of indigenous Hawaiians. It’s cultural appropriation.
And I think that perhaps Washburn knows he has done something problematic, because I read in his interviews how slickly he slides away from acknowledging that he is not Hawaiian. He proudly proclaims that he was “born and raised” on the Big Island, but he gets squirrelly when asked to admit his racial background (half African American, half “European American,” he says—another person would likely just say “white”).
As Jeanne, a biracial Tongan and respected media critic says:
“It’s hilarious to me how people just assume a non-Native POC has some kind of insider knowledge on Hawaiian culture just because they lived or even was born there. It like assuming I’m an expert on the history and culture of the Duamish people because I live in Seattle.”
No matter how much Washburn loves Hawaii and its culture, no matter how much research and respect he brings to the field, I still do not believe it is his place to appropriate the voice of native Hawaiians and attempt to write about their unique experiences—even in fiction.
Title: Fiebre Tropical Author: Juliana Delgado Lopera
Published: March 3, 2020
Genre(s): Literary Fiction
Page Count: 240
Rating:
Summary from Goodreads:Uprooted from Bogotá into an ant-infested Miami townhouse, fifteen-year-old Francisca is miserable in her strange new city. Her alienation grows when her mother is swept up in an evangelical church, replete with abstinent salsa dancers and baptisms for the dead. But there, Francisca meets the magnetic Carmen: head of the youth group and the pastor’s daughter. As her mother’s mental health deteriorates, Francisca falls for Carmen and is saved to grow closer with her, even as their relationship hurtles toward a shattering conclusion.
Juliana Delgado Lopera’s “Spanglish” debut novel is bold and unapologetic. Reading the first chapter, where the reader is flung headfirst into narrator Francisca’s chaotic, 100% one-of-a-kind storytelling was an electrifying experience. In casually bilingual prose, Francisca explains to her audience that her mother is planning the baptism of a baby she miscarried 17 years ago—and Francisca has been unwittingly invited along for the ride.
As an aside, Fiebre Tropical is one of those books that I feel was meant for a very particular audience and which makes me wonder how The Whites are going to react. If you don’t speak Spanish, don’t know about the miracles of vickvaporú, have zero aunts named Socorro and/or Milagros, and never watched the “yo soy darks” video…what is going to be your takeaway from this? (Not denigrating, just genuinely curious how an “outsider” would experience this story.) More importantly, this book makes me realize how deeply ingrained the “majority audience” is in literature—because when you find a book that so patently does not give a shit about making white readers comfortable, the perspective is so unexpected it feels almost wrong, somehow. Which is, of course, incredibly sad.
Much as I loved this book’s opening chapters, however, Delgado clearly struggled to find a focus here. She flings Francisca’s meandering, explosive thoughts down on the page willy-nilly, and the end result is a book that’s difficult to follow and seemingly a bit pointless. I’m not asking for a plot here, I’m just asking that this uncensored characterization be filtered through some sort of intentional lens. I wanted some guiding principal that enabled me, upon reaching the end, to say “so that’s what this book was all about!” instead of “what was the point of it all?”
So, unfortunately, as much as I adored the author’s style and her unapologetic (and clever) use of Spanglish, I didn’t like Fiebre Tropical very much in the end. I think that any novel needs strong characters and a sense of direction, but Delgado was only able to achieve one of those two here. I’m disappointed, but I think that Francisca’s voice is so vital that I don’t consider my time wasted.
Title: Luster Author: Raven Leilani
Published: August 4, 2020
Genre(s): Literary Fiction
Page Count: 240
Rating:
Summary from Goodreads:Luster sees a young black woman figuring her way into life as an artist and into love in this darkly comic novel. She meets Eric, a digital archivist with a family in New Jersey, including an autopsist wife who has agreed to an open marriage. In this world of contemporary sexual manners and racial politics, Edie finds herself unemployed and living with Eric. She becomes hesitant friend to his wife and a de facto role model to his adopted daughter. Edie is the only black woman young Akila may know.
How painful it is to be 23; how awkward and cruel and unfathomably vulgar—but also how real and breathless and exhilarating. How fucking demeaning it is to be a woman inside a slowly degrading meat-suit, trying to reconcile your traumas and your ambitions and your realities into a semblance of “adulthood.”
I feel it anew, this terrible disappointment in myself that I am happy to take out on him. He is the most obvious thing that has ever happened to me, and all aroudn the city it is happening to other silly, half-formed women excited by men who’ve simply met the prerequisite of living a little more life, a terribly unspecial thing is just what happens when you keep on getting up and brushing your teeth and going to work and ignoring the whisper that comes to you at night and tells you it would be easier to be dead. So, sure, an older man is a wonder because he has paid thirty-eight years of Con Ed bills and suffered food poisoning and seen the climate reports and still not killed himself, but somehow, after being a woman for twenty-three years, after the ovarian torsion and student loans and newfangled Nazis in button-downs, I too am still alive, and actually this is the more remarkable feat. Instead I let myself be awed by his middling command of the wine list.
I loved this book in spite of myself. Navel-gazey character studies of misanthropic New Yorkers have never been my cup of tea. Yet always, I find that even as I bemoan the “sameness” of this very niche subgenre, there’s always a novel or two each year that I love, something that brilliantly captures a portrait of its protagonist. Raven Leilani’s Luster crept up on me unawares, even as I assured myself that “no I am not interested in this story about a Baby Millennial having an affair with an older white man no definitely not.” I loved the gulping prose, the slowly unwinding character study, the unflinching real-surreal aesthetic of the entire book. This is a novel where the experience of reading is the most important, and whether you like Luster likely depends more on that than on whether the subject matter is “your thing” or not.
Luster is addictive, dysfunctional, beautiful, and wholly impressive.
Ahahahaha, well, okay, I assumed that your review of Luster was going to make me want to read Luster, which I already sort of wanted to read, but “navel-gazey New Yorker” and “affair with an older white man” made me feel so exhausted just looking at the words. Tough call here! Several different pals have raved about this book but ill-advised affair with older man books have slightly worn out their welcome chez moi. 😛
If it helps at all with your decision-making, I’d also add that there are several content warnings for: on-screen miscarriage, on-screen domestic violence, police brutality against Black people, and, I guess…lots of discussion about the protagonist’s bowel movements(?).