Creatures, ahoy! In this edition, The Other Black Girl and White Lotus.
There’s kind of a standard line about contemporary literary fiction, that it’s ecksquisite on the sentence level and bland on the level of plot and character. All these MFA novelists just suppurating with craft, but their social commentary is predictable and enervated, and nobody’s ever having any fun!
Zakiya Dalila Harris’s The Other Black Girl doesn’t feature coruscating prose. Honestly, there are a lot of really clumsy phrases here: “The mention of his name… often tinted dinner table atmospheres faster than Cheetos stained [sic] fingertips”; marital conflicts leave dinnertime “besmeared with all-out spiteful volleys”; there are “homogeneous throes.” And yet by the time I finished it, I was genuinely thrilled.
I first heard of this book as lit-fic satire about being Black in the publishing industry, and it is that, there are mortifying meetings and willfully clueless white liberal bosses and sharply-observed notes about getting your first office job and immediately setting up appointments for “an eye exam, a physical exam, and a much-needed dental cleaning.” But I picked the book up because Rachel Manija told me it was also genre sf/horror. (There are spoilers below the white gaps at that link and I really think this is a book best enjoyed with little foreknowledge.) Everybody else had said “Devil Wears Prada” and I shrugged; Rachel said the magic words “Sorry to Bother You,” and I grabbed.
Fantastic premise, plentiful (and justified) twists, gorgeously attentive details of Black women’s culture… and painful questions: about trust, identity, being “Black enough”; about Black suffering, and whether there’s something worse than suffering. About praxis, lol let’s all read a sf/horror novel about praxis, I’m so ready for this—about, to use less jargon, the difference between liberation and success.
I will say that the book feels a bit claustrophobic, and not in the intentional paranoiac way it does so well. In this interview Harris talks about walking through New York after Eric Garner was killed by police, and running across protests; The Other Black Girl’s political interventions are all about words, no protests or unions or mutual aid, it’s all novels or venting to your BFF or sharing takes on Twitter. The novel’s imagination about what people do as “politics” seemed limited, in much the same way that the idea of the political was limited in One Night in Miami.
I hesitate to say it’s a “fun” read. But it’s propulsive, full of all kinds of unexpected pleasures, even as it’s also harrowing.
White Lotus is a satirical suspense series, with each season set in a different luxury resort. It’s also a showcase for Jennifer Coolidge as a raspy, lost, yearning alcoholique d’un certain age. Coolidge is phenomenal. The visuals are also a pleasure: fashion, sun, palm trees, everything either sumptuous or sleek. (The buffets look kind of sad though. Show me an oyster the size of my hand!) I think some critics find this kind of glamorous-wealth television #problematic but you know, it is nice when tv is fun. It’s true that wealth is bleak, this is what we have the Succession interiors for, and it’s also true that people want to be wealthy because you can buy nice things and then look at them.
The first season is set in Hawai’i and alongside its satire of wealth it’s gonna attempt to say things about race and the legacy of colonialism. I don’t know that any of the things it said were groundbreaking, and in general this season’s satire of the liberal and progressive rich seemed fairly trite, which is not to say I didn’t occasionally snort in recognition. Both seasons struggle to give any characters except Coolidge’s Tanya more than one note. Season 1 comes closest in Belinda (Natasha Rothwell), the spa manager, aka “Belinda behind you” (for my money the show’s funniest single line, absurd and layered and perfectly-delivered).
This first season includes the show’s verdict (so far) on humanity: “Nobody cedes their privilege,” the white liberal dad argues. “That’s absurd. It goes against human nature. We’re all just trying to win the game of life.” His daughter doesn’t want him to go, sell all that he has, and give to the poor; she wants to make cynical comments about “capitalism” over her poolside buffet brunch. Even the character who attempts something she clearly believes is a revolutionary act, and which endangers her own safety, ends up making no personal sacrifice beyond feeling bad.
Second season is artsier—the opening credits are an absolute delight. Though the show is still not awash in subtlety of characterization, the season two people felt less carefully-constructed to make points in twitterish Discourse.
And there’s a late-breaking swerve away from satirical realism into baroque noir. I disliked that at first. It didn’t seem to fit, in tone or in what I thought the show wanted to say about its extremely telegraphed themes of wealth, the war between the sexes, and sex as an interchange of power and needs. I will also add that this season, set in Sicily, has exactly one (1) episode in which the locals experience Catholic guilt, complete with miserable deconsecrated-church sex (!!), and then it forgets forever about church and God and Santa Lucia holding her dang eyeballs in front of her sex-worker namesake. Literally nothing remotely like that is ever mentioned again. It’s a very odd choice that seems to have no purpose unless it is a finger pointed toward an alternative standpoint—an absurd alternative to human nature, one might say!
Anyway, the season two twist worked a lot better for me the more I mulled it over. I think its thesis is revealed when Tanya husks, “I live for beauty,” and the head gay (Adam Smallbone from Rev.!) replies, “I know you do.” Is it privilege when other people play along with your delusional image of yourself? Is it privilege that makes a person feel entitled to be seen as her best self, so that she accepts this verdict at face value as her due? In that moment, is he giving her the gift of seeing and honoring her deepest longings; or is he damaging her by strengthening her illusions about her self-absorbed life; or is he just acting the way people act around the people who control their access to money?
Those questions have some nice parallels and reverses in, say, the concierge/singer storyline, and mmmmmaybe in the Harper/adulterous techbro storyline as well. They’re weirder than the questions I thought White Lotus would tackle. They’re questions less about social satire and more about the relationship of power and honesty; less about the war between the sexes, and more about the relationship between eros and lack.
Chart of twist hairstyles at Cornrows & Co. of Washington, DC by Pamela Ferrell and family, found via Wikimedia Commons and used under a Creative Commons license.