Mixed Race Studies

White Lies

The New York Times
Sunday Book Review
2014-02-27

Porochista Khakpour

‘Boy, Snow, Bird,’ by Helen Oyeyemi

Strange times, crowed too many wise and unwise men over the millenniums. But as the art critic Jerry Saltz wrote in New York magazine last fall, maybe we’re finally at a point where the strangeness of the times is matched by an ability to accept it. In defending the perplexing Kanye West video “Bound 2,” Saltz heralded this as an age of the New Uncanny. The all-American banal-bizarre spectacle of the video (synthetic sunsets; slow-motion galloping stallions; the nippleless ingénue) is “a freakish act of creation and destruction by appropriation,” what Saltz deems “part of a collective cultural fracturing.” Saltz is riffing on Freud’s description of the uncanny as “nothing new or alien, but something familiar and old-established in the mind and which has become alienated from it only through the process of repression.” But maybe we’re not as alienated as we once were, something that occurred to me when beholding another unapologetic, all-encompassing contradiction-celebration: the story-allegory and real-surreal gyre of Helen Oyeyemi’s gloriously unsettling new novel, “Boy, Snow, Bird.”

Oyeyemi is from Strange Times. Raised in Britain by Nigerian parents, the 29-year-old five-time novelist isn’t even affiliated with a single home anymore: London, New York, Berlin, Barcelona, Budapest, Prague — who knows where she is doing her thing at any given moment? For years I saw her as something of a literary mystic, reading her with a mixture of awe, confusion and delight, but only now do I feel that we’re at a place where we can properly receive her, and she’s ready for us too. With “Boy, Snow, Bird,” a culmination of a young life spent culling dreamscapes, Oyeyemi’s confidence is palpable — it’s clear that this is the book she’s been waiting for…

…As usual, the Oyeyemi foundation is located in her fairy-tale comfort zone — in the case of “Boy, Snow, Bird,” the fairy tale is “Snow White.” She uses the “skin as white as snow” ideal as the departure point for a cautionary tale on post-race ideology, racial limbos and the politics of passing. It feels less Disney or German folklore and more Donald Barthelme’s 1967 novella “Snow White,” in which the political and the social poke through the bones of a pretty children’s tale, alarming us with its critical cultural import.

Set in the 1950s, Oyeyemi’s novel opens on the Lower East Side of New York City, with a young white woman named Boy Novak running away from her violent rat-catcher father. She soon meets a widower, a jewelry craftsman and former history professor named Arturo Whitman, in Flax Hill, Mass. She marries Whitman and becomes obsessed by her new stepdaughter, Snow. “What was it about Snow?” Boy asks herself. Oyeyemi paints Snow as half virtual, half corporeal: “She was poised and sympathetic, like a girl who’d just come from the future but didn’t want to brag about it.” All seems well until Arturo and Boy have a daughter of their own, Bird, who is born undeniably “colored.” Whitman’s family members are light-skinned African-Americans who have been passing as white, and the revelation becomes a turning point. The Snow White bits take over, with the Wicked Stepmother and the mirror motifs, and the fairy tale rewrites itself in startling ways…

Read the entire review here.