Book Review: Boy, Snow, Bird by Helen Oyeyemi
A one of a kind book
Chebet keeps namedropping this book randomly in conversations, so in the end I had to say, alright, I get the hint, I’ll read the damn book.
I want to talk about this book, but as always, I want to avoid giving spoilers, so don’t expect me to give a summary of what happens in the book. This is going to be a problem with this book because there are some themes in the book you can’t really talk about without dishing spoilers. Nevertheless, I will do my best. As always, what I am writing is more of an essay than a book review: basically, the thoughts and impressions that came to me in the course of reading the book.
First of All, the Style
At first, the style made me think of Henry Miller and Proust. Those are my go-to references when I want to say someone’s style is intricate and dense. But it’s a woman’s style, in this case, and that gives it a different bent: it’s chatty, intimate, friendly, all-knowing. There is a way excellent female authors have of writing that takes you into their confidence, as if they are sharing tasty morsels of gossip with you. The best of them manage to do that in an offhand manner, as if to say, “I don’t even care about this, but listen …” I first discovered the pleasures female writers can provide that you don’t get from male writers when I read Sense and Sensibility by Jane Austen three years ago. It is a way female writers have of dissecting the mundane, the psychological, the spiritual, the things of everyday life, the inner life of the mind. They really go into their characters’ minds in a way that male authors don’t, a certain total surrender to subjectivity (I’m not sure if that is true, but it feels right). I say this as a male writer who sees things in these feminine books that I admire and know I wouldn’t be able to pull them off — or rather, I haven’t been pulling them off and would have to intentionally learn how to pull them off. The other female writer I know who pulled off this offhand, intimate, gossipy way of writing about the mundane, yet highly interesting lives of her (usually female) characters is Gertrude Stein (whose book Three Lives I recently had the good fortune of stumbling upon in the streets of Nairobi — at Tom Mboya, near archive as you are walking towards Odeon).
Anyway, Helen Oyeyemi writes like that, a style which I really admire, being a thorough fan of Henry Miller and of the little bit I have read of Proust. This is a narrator’s style. In this style, the most important thing isn’t necessarily the things that are happening, but how the narrator interprets them. In other words, we are seeing the story through the eyes of an unreliable first person narrator. We realize that the first narrator is unreliable when we get to part two of the story and a new narrator takes over the story, giving us the opportunity to start reassessing what we know so far based on what the first narrator told us. I think this was very interesting, because it reveals how a story is never just a recitation of facts, but a reflection of the person telling it. Point of view is very important, and having two narrators in this novel proves that. So what this style does is that it reveals character, personality, a style that oozes voice and unique POV. Think J.D. Salinger’s Catcher in the Rye. Salinger is probably the best example of someone who pulled it off, since he did this in every single story he wrote, and they were all fictional — Henry Miller and Proust were writing about themselves, but Salinger was writing about characters he created, and each of the characters were different. Helen Oyeyemi, from what I have seen, is like Salinger — she creates a character who lives and breathes and then tells a story through her eyes. And there are two such narrating characters in the book, and both have their own distinct voices, something only an absolute pro can manage. And in addition to these two narrators, there are also a number of letters and pieces of writing written by other characters and there too she manages to capture their distinct personalities and voices in the unique bent of each character’s manner of writing.
The Plot
The thing about writing like this, writers who do that usually don’t have much of a story to tell. For instance, what’s the story in Henry Miller’s Tropic of Cancer or Proust’s Swann’s Way or Salinger’s Catcher in the Rye? But Helen Oyeyemi, to my surprise, did have a story to tell, and boy what a story. That’s why I don’t even want to talk about what happens in the book, because even discussing the themes would be a big spoiler. Let’s just say that when I started reading, I thought this would be one of those stories where nothing much happens. But in this story, things do happen and things have happened in the past — many of the characters have pasts which they are trying to run away from, but these pasts are trying to come back, and in the end you can’t hide from who you are forever. The story begins with what seems to be a simple plot, but that’s just writing wizardry by Oyeyemi, a sleight of hand — she is lulling us into complacency, and then, boom, plot twists! Once the first plot twist happens, the book becomes pretty much unputdownable. Combine the immersive style and the propulsive plot and you have yourself a story that will be hard to forget.
The Themes
I don’t want to speak about the themes, because that will give spoilers, but let’s just say, Helen goes there. She doesn’t dance around the edges, she goes in, and the things she reveals about the topic of this novel are illuminating. That doesn’t sound satisfying? Okay, the big theme is racism in America, quite timely, given what is happening there right now. Racism in the context of a family. It’s the kind of insider information (about racism) that you could only get from someone who has observed it intimately and written down endless notes about it, the little ways in which it affects people. It actually made me think of the two Jordan Peele movies, Us and Get Out — particularly Get Out because it’s the one that addresses the issue of racism.
The Genre
I should also talk about the genre. I hope it’s not a spoiler when I say that there is quite a bit of magical realism in this story. The fact that things that defy the laws of physics happen in the story but the narrator talks about them in a more or less normal fashion, not blowing them out of proportion, not making them the center of attention. Think of the show Atlanta, the Donald Glover show about what it means to be black in America that plays quite a lot with surrealism. So I would say, if you want to get what this book is about, watch Atlanta, watch Get Out, and watch Us.
I should also add that there is a lot of appropriation from fairy tales in this novel. The novel itself has a feel of unreality to it, yet the story is told with a lot of realism in terms of historical details and the details of character and setting. So reality and unreality are blended, both in the details of the story and in the atmosphere it evokes (if that makes sense). This blend of magic and reality is what makes it a magical realism story.
Conclusion
This is one of the most unique things I have ever read. I’ve glanced at a few reviews on goodreads.com, and I can see there are readers who didn’t like the book. The things I liked are the things they hated. What is brilliance to me is failure to them. That’s astounding to me, and rather saddening too.
