The book:
This month’s Shelf Improvement author Helen Oyeyemi has only just reached her thirties, yet already has five novels to her name, and was justly included in the Granta Best of Young British Novelists list. Her most recent, Boy, Snow, Bird, confirms her original and gentle prose to be some of the best new fiction around.
Our protagonist, a woman named Boy, escapes a troubled childhood to find a partner in Arturo, a widower and father of the beautiful, blonde Snow. When their daughter, Bird, is born dark-skinned, truth and family history are questioned. As with her other stories, Boy, Snow Bird loosely follows a fairytale narrative, this time the classic tale of jealousy and banishment of Snow White, intertwined with the setting and issues of the novel; a 1950s and 60s America still in the throes of widely-accepted racism.
We cannot give away more, but as we change narrators, Oyeyemi bewitchingly explores what is real and what is not, and the novel swirls around the both the fairytale story, mirrors and evil stepmother motifs, and the exploration of beauty to unfold into a darker, complex story of race and identity.
What the Guardian thought:
Helen Oyeyemi’s novels are characterised by the playful incorporation of myth, folklore and fairytale, ranging widely over the territories and cultures in which those endlessly recirculating, subtly mutating narratives become embedded. From the doppelgangers of her debut novel Icarus Girl, written while she was still at school and published in 2005, to the melding of Yoruba and Cuba in The Opposite House, the central ghost story of White is for Witching and the reimagining of the story of Bluebeard in Mr Fox, Oyeyemi has demonstrated that she has both an itinerant fascination with the world’s stories and a strong tendency to return to a smaller clutch of suggestive themes.
Her fifth novel, and the first since she appeared on Granta’s most recent list of Best Young British Novelists, opens with a motherless girl called Boy, a child-woman who, shortly after we meet her, escapes from her violent father. An inversion is already in place, for Frank Novak is a rat-catcher; but, unlike the Pied Piper of Hamelin, he drives people away rather than casting a spell over them. Boy jumps on the first bus out of New York and finds herself in the little New England town of Flax Hill.
Early on, Boy tells us about her white-blond hair, her black eyes and her high forehead – put it together with her surname and you come up with Vertigo, that terrifying exploration of disguise and duplicity, in which Kim Novak plays twin roles. Like Hitchcock, Oyeyemi is interested not merely in what happens when you attempt to pass for someone else, but in the porous boundaries between one self and another.
As Boy changes, so does the focus of the narrative. We leap from a fairytale into something far more uncompromisingly concrete, in which phenomena such as mirrors and shadows have entirely different connotations. When Arturo’s mother, Olivia, explains the world that she decided to escape, she describes it in terms of its unreality, its otherness.
In her manipulation of a succession of overlapping triangles of which the book’s title is only one, Oyeyemi suggests the possibility of a kind of redemption; that identities eventually settle, configure, cohere and that we all learn to live with the life that we have fashioned for ourselves. In an intriguing, sinuously attractive book full of jeux d’esprit and lightning skies that often part to reveal pain and turmoil, it is a welcome hint of stability and optimism, if not one that we should trust in entirely.
Alex Clark - Read the full review
If you liked this, then try:
-
The Illuminations by Andrew O’Hagan
-
The Shipping News by Annie Proulx
- The Yiddish Policemen’s Union by Michael Chabon
To order a Shelf Improvement subscription, please ring our Shelf Improvement Order Hotline on 0330 333 6868. We are waiting your call to spruce up old bookshelves.
