But all too often, she’s with him voluntarily because she wants to be beaten. His female partner feels nothing for him – not even fear or guilt. His only feelings are belligerent insecurity and bestial lust. The abuser is always a cartoonish, leering, violent pig who not only lacks any good qualities he lacks any other qualities. This is not unexpected what is surprising is how it is portrayed. Here, violence against women appears in roughly half the stories. The abuser is always a cartoonish, leering, violent pig who not only lacks good qualities he lacks any other qualitiesĪ peculiarity of short-story collections is that any preoccupation of the author stands out, as story after story returns to it. But we’re generally carried past these clumsy details by the force of Gay’s narrative voice.
In “La Negra Blanca”, a woman being sexually harassed by her boss states baldly, “I need this job”, before submitting to his advances he then says to her, “Do you need a Daddy?” by which point the reader is cringing for the wrong reasons. Gay’s language is powerful but sometimes careless, which can result in Fifty Shades prose, like this passage from “Noble Things”: “From the beginning, they had shared something strong, something beyond anything they had ever known … Parker loved her edge, how she could never be tamed.” The dialogue can also be mechanical. Where there are flaws in individual stories, they are those one would expect from someone who is by temperament a popular writer. Another gem is “North Country”, about a young academic at an isolated college who starts a relationship with a working-class local it’s meticulous in tone and detail, understated and exquisite. “Requiem for a Glass Heart” develops into a beautiful allegory on human frailty. In many stories, this strength is sustained and magnified. She is especially masterful at writing striking openings: “My husband is not a kind man and with him, I am not a good person” “The stone-thrower lives in a glass house with his glass family” “My husband is a hunter. Gay is a writer of formidable charm and intellect, with a knack for intriguing premises.
But in her new short story collection, she is in danger of suggesting that women can find abuse both cathartic and sexually satisfying. She is known for her fierce stance against violence towards women, and against the way fictional representations tend to normalise or even excuse it. R oxane Gay is one of those public intellectuals who has come to represent a school of thought: in her case, a 21st-century intersectional feminism that’s friendly to lipstick but against body shaming fond of pop culture but strongly critical of its exclusionary tendencies.
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