skygiants | Entries tagged with helen oyeyemi

Man, I'm sitting here tearing out my hair over Boy, Snow, Bird. HELEN OYEYEMI. I don't know what to do with this.

Okay, so as has been previously established in these here parts, Helen Oyeyemi is a bona fide genius. This cannot be argued with. And for the first, say, 90% of Boy, Snow, Bird, it was probably my favorite thing she'd ever written? I read the first chapter on the subway yesterday, and then sat on a bench on the way home and read four more, even though I hadn't eaten in about ten hours and was starving, because I couldn't stop; the voices and prose were too much, I couldn't put it down.

Boy is a girl, born in New York in the 1930s. A quote, from Boy: "Where does character come into it? Just this: I've always been pretty sure I could kill someone if I had to. Myself, or my father -- whichever option proved most practical. I wouldn't kill for hatred's sake; I'd only do it to solve a problem." But instead of killing herself or her father, Boy takes a midnight bus out of town, and finds herself in a small artisan's town in Massachusetts, which is where the story takes place, and where she meets Snow.

Snow is also a girl, an extraordinarily beautiful girl, the beloved daughter of a widower. Snow is lovely, she's sweet, she has no temper; she always knows exactly the right thing to say, even at the age of six. Nobody can believe she's quite real, not even Snow herself. A quote, from Snow (not at the age of six): "It's a relief to be able to forget about what I might or might not be mistaken for. My reflection can't be counted on, she's not always there but I am, so maybe she's not really me ... well, what is she then? I guess we'll find out someday, but I'm not holding my breath."

And Bird is yet another girl; she's the girl who comes along after Boy and Snow meet, and changes everything around, for everybody. A quote, from Bird: "Do I feel bad for blowing Aunt Viv's cover? Not really. I accidentally brought truth to light, and bringing truth to light is the right thing to do." Bird is not the daughter her family expected, or wanted; she's not white enough for that. Maybe that's why she doesn't always show up in mirrors.

Boy, Snow, Bird is a book that takes place in a very real place, a very real time -- the Northeast in the 1950s and 60s -- with jagged edges of fairy tales new and old running through it; Boy's father the rat-catcher, shoes that don't fit, spiders that talk; a story about a woman and a wizard that two women make up between them, while pretending that they read it once before, in a book, and are just retelling it to each other now; two more stories passed between sisters, as a kind of proof of identity and belief.

And of course mothers and daughters and sisters everywhere, and of course mirrors everywhere, and of course always, everywhere Snow, as the Snow White story at the heart of the novel twists into an examination of race and beauty and identity.

And it's so good! IT'S SO GOOD. It's meaty and gorgeous and full of amazingly strong character voices and complicated, painful dynamics and beautiful prose, and then you start nearing the end and you're like, 'wow, everything is so fascinating and complex! I wonder how Oyeyemi is going to wrap all this up!'

And the answer is .... with a left-turn DRAMATIC BACKSTORY SHIFT that involves ( A REALLY BIZARRE AND OFFENSIVE REVEAL OF A TRANS CHARACTER, very spoilery details under cut ) Followed by a gesture towards hope and change and catharsis about to play out in a potentially fascinating way, followed by ... A FULL STOP.

AND THAT'S WHY I'M BANGING MY HEAD AGAINST A WALL RIGHT NOW, please help.

Crossposts: http://bookelfe.livejournal.com/382217.html

Every other book I've read by Helen Oyeyemi, I walked away from thinking, "Helen Oyeyemi is a genius!"

I walked away from Mr. Fox thinking "Helen Oyeyemi is a genius! . . . I don't know if I'm enough of a genius for Helen Oyeyemi."

I love the concept behind Mr. Fox. Mr. Fox is an author who has made fame and fortune by writing lots and lots and lots of stories in which the heroine dies, usually by being brutally murdered. Mr. Fox has channeled his muse into an imaginary friend; her name is Mary Foxe. The book begins with Mary Foxe showing up to explain that she is getting quite annoyed by this and perhaps it's time that Mr. Fox tried, you know, not killing women in every single story.

Mr. Fox essentially responds to this by going "LOL! What a wacky notion!"

So Mary Foxe proposes that she and Mr. Fox play a game, a story-game, a fairy-tale game. The rules are unclear; the goal is also unclear, although "let's pretend that women have agency" and "let's achieve emotional connection without anybody dying horribly" may well be part of it. (This sometimes does and sometimes does not succeed.)

The game kicks off what's essentially a book of short stories, linked by passages in which Mr. Fox and Mary Foxe and Mr. Fox's increasingly-irritated wife negotiate what may be reality -- a state that imaginary Mary Foxe is coming ever closer to achieving.

The stories are gorgeous, the themes are relevant, the references are rich and complex. Individual bits spoke to me very strongly, and I cannot tie the central metaphors together in my head at all. Not on a casual read, at least, not in any intuitive way, without diagrams and footnotes and references to chart who's being who in what story at any given time. I fully believe that Mr. Fox is a work of staggering genius with a rich palimpsest of textual layers providing a dazzling commentary on the interaction between the imagination and emotional relationships! A week after reading it, I think I may even be putting some of it all together into a framework that makes sense for me -- but maybe I've just forgotten the parts that don't fit.

If someone else reads it and comprehends it all in a brilliant flash of intuition, I hope they come here and tell me about it. I WANT TO UNDERSTAND.

Crossposts: http://bookelfe.livejournal.com/280204.html

Fiction doesn't really scare me very often these days - backlash, I think, from fifteen years ago when I was the kid who wouldn't read Goosebumps because it freaked me out. But now, now I am older and my nerves have become steel! I laugh at Stephen King's demonbaby werespiders, I watch the stone angel episodes of Doctor Who by myself at 1 AM with nary a qualm.

I say this so that when I say that Helen Oyeyemi's White is for Witching is a book that really scared me at points, you will understand that this is not usual for me.

White is for Witching is about a house, creepy and constantly shifting in the tradition of houses in horror; and about a family, troubled not quite in the tradition of families in horror; and about teenaged twins Miranda and Eliot, codependent and creepy completely in the grand tradition of teenaged twins in horror. It also integrates questions of gender and immigration and mental health and race in ways that are often not at all obvious, or in the grand tradition of horror at all.

It's easier to write about the style of the book than the plot, such as it is - which can largely be reduced to 'Miranda and Eliot's mother dies while abroad; everyone fails to cope, Miranda most spectacularly; and both house and Miranda get creepier and creepier and creepier.' The book switches back and forth in narration between Eliot; Ore, a girl Miranda meets at Oxford, who loves her; and the house, either in first-person as its creepy creepy self, or in close third person with Miranda. It is the sort of narrative that might be called postmodern, I think, but I often don't like postmodern tactics in writing, and I liked this. Also the writing is just ridiculously gorgeous. If I had to write an X meets Y statement, I would call it House of Leaves meets An Experiment in Love, but it is a bit disingenuous for me to say this since I have not actually read House of Leaves, only heard lots and lots about it. Nonetheless that would be my impression.

As a completely unrelated sidenote, it also features the best description I've ever seen of Edgar Allen Poe:

"I think Poe's quite good, actually. The whole casual horror thing. Like someone standing next to you and screaming their head off and you asking them what the fuck and them stopping for a moment to say 'Oh you know, I'm just afraid of Death' and then they keep on with the screaming."

"Hm," said Miranda. "I'd rather they talked to someone about this fear."

"A psychiatrist couldn't put up with all the screaming."

The one thing I will say is that while in many ways I thought this was much better than The Icarus Girl - which was already pretty amazing - I found the ending unsatisfying in a similar way to the ending of that book, and I don't think I am willing to put that down to style. It was absolutely worth the ride, though.

It seems like a large number of the creepiest ghost stories involve some sort of creepy small child. (Most often, a creepy little girl.)

Helen Oyeyemi's The Icarus Girl is a little different from the usual, in that the story is actually told from the perspective of the aforementioned creepy little girl. Jessamy Harrison is eight years old, the solitary and precocious child of a Nigerian author and her English husband; she's prone to writing poetry, curling up in closets with books above her reading level, throwing sudden and inexplicable panic attack-related tantrums and falling equally inexplicably ill. At the beginning of the book, Jessamy's family takes her to her first visit to Nigeria to meet her mother's family, where she bonds with her grandfather and with a strange girl named Titiola, whom Jessamy calls TillyTilly. TillyTilly apparently lives in an abandoned outpost of the family house, has no visible parents, speaks in broken Nigerian-accented English when they meet but is soon discussing poetry and English literature with Jessamy as if she's been doing it her whole life. She's the best (possibly only) friend Jessamy has ever had - and shortly after Jessamy returns to England, TillyTilly mysteriously shows up on her street and promises to be her friend forever! WHAT COULD BE AWESOMER.

I'm sure everyone can guess where this is going.

There are a lot of interesting things going on in this book. Oyeyemi is writing a lot of play with doubles and identity and naming and belonging; the connection between Jessamy and TillyTilly is kind of fascinating and has a lot of room for interpretation. (Including the obvious "is TillyTilly real or is this kid JUST CRAZY?" one, but I find that less interesting than the other options.) I really like that the book is from Jessamy's perspective - and it's really interesting to see the way the adults react to this haunted and sometimes frightening child through Jessamy's own eyes - but at the same time I get the feeling that Oyeyemi sometimes found it frustrating to be limited to the viewpoint of a bright but not-necessarily-sane child. There are one or two points where she suddenly jumps to someone else's viewpoint to explain what's going on, which I found somewhat jarring. And there are a couple places, especially towards the end, where the narrative flies somewhat out of control; I left the story feeling like all the strands of metaphor hadn't quite come together enough. On the other hand, Oyeyemi is a freaking genius who wrote this book when she was eighteen, so I think this is forgivable.