I recently watched Adam McKay’s start-packed, apocalyptic movie ‘Don’t Look Up’, where a big comet is about to hit the Earth and destroy it but despite the scientists’ warnings, everybody, from the US President to people on their phones, is taking it as a joke. While the movie, with acute and pointed satire, successfully portrays today’s failing modern culture, as ‘a movie’, sadly though, it fails. It never for once looked a like a film; its focus always shifted from one satire to another with no grounding story underneath.
As important as it is for the arts to convey the message of its day and open the eyes of its viewers, whenever the message leaps over the art-form itself, it no longer, in my opinion, remains art. It might as well be advertisement. Art, while being true to itself, should hold within it the message, conveyed with ease and subtlety: it should never become the message itself.
Woodson’s splashing 2018 novel about a generational-long story of two African-American families also had a similar issue: while she definitely has a strong story to tell, which stretches three generations back into 1920s, with insightful commentaries about colored Americans’ past and present discriminations, about the sexuality of young bodies, about giving birth at an early age and pursuing one’s ambitions, among others, the novel through which she tells this story never quite shined itself. The novel, in other words, couldn’t get its own story to tell, but was, with Woodson’s culturally loud and upbeat prose, always scripted and carried by story that the author wanted to write about.
The novel starts with Melody’s sixteenth birthday, Iris and Aubrey’s daughter who was born when Iris was herself sixteen years old, as she wears her mother’s dress which she herself couldn’t wear at that same year, while arguing loudly between them. Woodson’s choice for writing this novel in spaced paragraphs, and the dialogues in italics, rather than the conventional way, makes for a very uncomfortable entry into the story, but right after the first chapter, the story begins on its swapping and un-landing journey of telling an ancestral story, making for an even more confused reading experience throughout the book.
It intermittently talks about Iris’s parents and grandparents, and then to Aubrey’s; all the while going back and forth between the past and present, without any distinct shifting clues. Each chapter is told in the first person, but since each chapter is not only told by a different character but sometimes by a few characters in one chapter, it becomes hard to flow with the story and keep track of who’s talking in which generation.
Although this novel was highly acclaimed upon its publication, which is obvious by the praises on its front-and-back cover, and although I had quite liked Woodson through her TED talk, this novel despite my anticipation for it, didn’t quite land right with me. Everything that made this a uniquely brilliant novel for the many others: Woodson’s unconventional storytelling; the ancestral roots of the story; intentionally thin size at 200 pages; the punchy, loud, and culturally induced writing style; and her insightful and bold commentary - didn’t sadly work for me.
For me it was confused, distant, and untouching reading experience with a very few winning moments.
Ratings: 3/5 *** December
30, 2021_