♑︎♑︎♑︎ ♑︎♑︎♑︎'s Reviews > Assembly

I mirror the mother's amusement, recognizing her practised enunciation; how deliberately she forms consonants around laboured vowels. She is wholly illuminated, in this moment, here, in her stunning kitchen.

What an unnerving book this is. I spent the first two-thirds of the novel thinking critical things about the narrator, like: "why is this woman lying to this man about her grave condition?" and: "why is this woman putting up with these odious people, these outrageous situations, where even in her thoughts she protects them and defends them, and pushes away her discomforts, and doesn't ever get angry?"...and then I came to a nearly-blank page, where, at the bottom in small letters, I read:

1. It is remarkable, even
in the ostensible privacy of my own thoughts
I feel (still)
compelled
to restrict what I say.

There it is. The moment when this narrator enveloped me, and made me feel what she is feeling, and made me understand that she's way ahead of me--that I've been reading the entire book until then from the viewpoint of privilege--and that this character is deeply aware of her contradictions and concessions to white people and it's literally killing her.

This is a deceptively complicated novel. If I'm to understand it and accept it fully, I also need to accept that I'm complicit. I need to turn the mirror back on myself, and see the ways I've excluded, assumed, dissembled people who are not like me, and have benefited from their exclusion. That's quite a lot to achieve in a 100-page book, one that falls uneasily between fiction and philosophical essay.