Susan (a shrink with a lot of time on her hands) says to Tom, "Will you stay in New York and tell me all you know?" and he does, for nearly 600 mostly-bloated pages of flashbacks depicting The Family Wingo of swampy Colleton County: a beautiful mother, a brutal shrimper father (the Great Santini alive and kicking), and Tom and Savannah's much-admired older brother, Luke. Savannah, it turns out, is catatonic, and before the suicide attempt had completely assumed the identity of a dead friend-the implication being that she couldn't stand being a Wingo anymore.
When he hears that his fierce, beautiful twin sister Savannah, a well-known New York poet, has once again attempted suicide, he escapes his present emasculation by flying north to meet Savannah's comely psychiatrist, Susan Lowenstein. Tom Wingo is an unemployed South Carolinian football coach whose internist wife is having an affair with a pompous cardiac man. This is Brown’s first novel, and it has all the jagged clarity of a shard of broken glass.Ī piercing meditation on identity and race in contemporary Britain.Ī flabby, fervid melodrama of a high-strung Southern family from Conroy ( The Great Santini, The Lords of Discipline), whose penchant for overwriting once again obscures a genuine talent. In just over a hundred pages, Brown tackles not only race, but class, wealth, and gender disparities, the lingering effects of colonialism, and the limits of language (“How can I use such a language to examine the society it reinforces?” the narrator wonders). She is constantly aware of how her appearance is utilized by others-part of her job, for instance, involves giving talks on diversity, for which her very presence is considered proof of her company’s success.
Some other entity.” Indeed, the narrator seems painfully distant from both the people around her and the changes taking place in her life. “But I try to consider events as if they’re happening to someone else. Between the oncologist and the party is an intense rumination on her choices, her life, and the pieces from which she’s managed to assemble an identity, however flawed.
On the other end is a visit the narrator pays to her oncologist, where she discovers she has a decision to make. Her White boyfriend comes from a moneyed old family, and an invitation to his parents’ anniversary party-a gargantuan affair-frames one end of this slim, swiftly moving novel. “I am everything they told me to become,” she says. She works, and for as long as she can remember she has worked, in relentless pursuit of achievement, success, excellence. A young Black woman considers her options.Īt the center of this brilliant debut is a young Black British woman who works in finance.
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