Girl Crazy by Russell Smith
2010; University of Oklahoma; Volume: 84; Issue: 4 Linguagem: Inglês
10.1353/wlt.2010.0181
ISSN1945-8134
Autores Tópico(s)American Literature and Culture
ResumoIi/|??^LEN PERKINS-VAUDEZ^j ^ Aauunuintu' uifi?yu!!R;im.ji^j- n un. m - j . u ji i j uiiiumia? mil t!B? H'UH^PPWPP^ southerners who bring their slave women with them under the pre tense of needing domestic assis tance. Mawu's master is a widower who "visited the women in the slave quarters even before his wife was dead." Lizzie's master never takes his wife with him. The language of the novel is poetic. Mawu chooses a spot for cooking her stew because "that big old tree blocked the wind like a giant woman." The so-called trust ed group of slaves desiring to see the nearby free colored resort are warned if they are a few minutes late for evening chores, the preg nant slave Sweet would be beaten. According to the narrator, "It was a cruel bargain?one harsh enough to make them sit around the camp for three hours that morning won dering if they should venture off anywhere at all. It was a promise layered on top of other unspo ken threats, hinting at violence to their children, parents, siblings back at the plantations should they overestimate the men's pity for a pregnant woman." The work also features enduring portraits of the trials of motherhood under the peculiar institution. The looming question is: Should they run since they are on free land? The resounding answer harkens back to the children. Only Mawu admon ishes: "Who don't got childrens? But what Fm gonde do for my child as a slave woman? I need to run off so as I can try to get my boy out. As long as I is a slave, ain't nothing gone change." The introduction of the charac ter Glory recalls Shirley Anne Wil liams's Dessa Rose. Glory is a Quaker woman, the wife of a local farmer who supplies dairy products to the resort. According to the narrator, "There was something about the way in which she shared the air with them [the slaves]. As if it belonged to all of them and was not hers alone." She befriends Lizzie then serves as something of a media tor between Lizzie and Mawu. The dynamics between the three women are extraordinary. Wench echoes, revises, and/or enlarges upon resistance and neore sistance narratives by Mary Seacole, Linda Brent, Shirley Anne Williams, Beryl Gilroy, Toni Morrison, Barbara Chase-Riboud, and Alice Walker, among others. All the characters are sensitively drawn with various nuances, and there are many layers to this novel. Adele S. Newson-Horst Missouri State University Russell Smith. Girl Crazy. Toronto. HarperCollins Canada. 2010. 385 pages. CAN$22.99. isbn 978-1-55468 534-9 Girl Crazy moves out of the hip cul tural scene of Russell Smith's first three novels to a seedy but at times Nota Bene Haij of tin* Star Lciircl Hont Laird Hunt Ray of the Star Coffee House Laird Hunt has been called one of America's "most talented young writers" by Paul Auster. Publishers Weekly described his fourth novel as a "noir labyrinth" that "captures the post 9/11 gestalt of anxiety and hopelessness." Hwang Sok-Yong The Old Garden Jay Oh, tr. Seven Stories This is the first English translation of the novel written by South Korean author Hwang two years after his release from prison for visiting Pyongyang in 1989. It is "a tragic love story ... set against the back drop of the end of the Cold War." July - August 201 0 i 69 WORLD LITERATURE IN REVIEW ^ l I oddly vibrant Toronto with distinct ly noir elements. Justin, the central consciousness and semi-anti-hero, might be Kingsley Amis's Lucky Jim Dixon reincarnated in an even worse job as an adjunct teaching business writing at a community college, living in a shoddy apart ment, chronically short of money, with a moderate but persistent lin gerie fetish. He has become increas ingly detached from his university friends, all more affluent than he, and is newly more or less detached from his rather boring and politi cally correct girlfriend. Like Dixon, and perhaps even more like the Jeff Daniels character in the 1986...
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