Product Description

A controversial, painfully intimate depiction of race in America by the esteemed author of 'We were the Mulvaneys', 'Blonde' and 'The Falls'. Fifteen years after the mysterious death of Minette Swift -- a 19-year-old black girl enrolled as a scholarship student in an exclusive liberal arts college -- her former roommate Genna begins an unofficial enquiry into the traumatic event. In reconstructing the girls' tumultuous freshman year at the college, Genna is led also to reconstruct her life as the daughter of a famous 'radical-hippie-lawyer' of the 1960s among whose clients were anti-Vietnam war protesters wanted by the FBI. What follows is a gripping and personal portrayal of 'black' and 'white' in America in the years of crisis following the end of the Vietnam War, and the ignominious exposure and fall of President Richard Nixon.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #92415 in Books
• Published on: 2007-09-03
• Original language: English
• Binding: Paperback
• 448 pages

Review
'Failures of communication seem both tragic and inevitable in a novel that reveals its author's awareness of the complexities involved in personal and political relationships too often portrayed as stereotypes.' Sunday Times 'Oates is such an intelligent writer, and one who is also always highly readable.' Independent on Sunday 'Oates is digging her pen into the sensitive heart of the race question, with all the intelligence and humanity we have come to expect from this brilliant and bafflingly prolific writer.' The Times 'A compelling!read.' Daily Telegraph 'Where the novel truly stands out is in its depiction of its two protagonists. Genna is a fine portrait on the coruscating effects of guilt on a young soul. Her halting, self-lacerating voice is painfully acute, such as when she ponders whether the persecution of her roommate is just a malicious dormitory prank or much worse.' Guardian 'This is a riveting, painful deception of white guilt, youthful regret and unrequited passion set in America's years of crisis following the end of the Vietnam War' Daily Mail 'The prolific Oates is bang on form with this one, a cunningly loaded mix of post-Nixon paranoia, public racism and private madness.' Metro 'Funny and unsettling.' Independent

Daily Telegraph
'A compelling...read.'

Financial Times
'Joyce Carol Oates is one of nature's unstoppably forces...Black
Girl/White Girl...is powerful and stylish.'

Customer Reviews

Oates on fine form - again.
There is no subject that Joyce Carol Oates seems unable to write about, and in her new novel she once more casts her observant eye on a controversial part of America's past.

The novel centres on the events leading up to the death of Generva Meade's roommate, 19 year old Minette Swift, at the Schuyler Liberal Arts College in the spring of 1975.

Told from a 15-years-on point of view, Generva (or Genna, as she is more frequently referred to in the novel), is looking back at her past, and that of Minette, in order to understand how such a terrible death befell her room-mate.

Initially the two characters seem entirely different. Genna is from a well-connected family. Her ancestors founded Schuyler Liberal Arts College and she is heir to a Quaker fortune. Her father is an infamous and radical lawyer who in the past has supported many activist causes and was deeply involved in the "hippy underground" movement of the 60's.

Minette is at the college on a Merit Scholarship as her family do not have the funds to pay the full college tuition fees. Her father is a minister in a very highly regarded Washington DC church.

As the novel progresses however it is clear that the young women are much more similar than they realise. Each is overtly afraid that their backgrounds will be discovered, and that people will therefore perceive them to be something they are not.

Genna feels trapped by her radical, free-thinking, privileged upbringing and so tries desperately hard to do the non-conventional and befriend Minette, one of Schuyler's few black students.

Minette realizes how poorly prepared public school has left her for life at Schuyler College and so retreats into herself, into her Bible, and consumes so much food that her weight increases greatly. Hiding behind a feeling of defeat Minette accepts all of the sympathy that is offered when she becomes the target of seemingly racially motivated harassment.

In the final third of the novel Oates very cleverly steers the story in a completely unexpected direction, and the ending, which does reveal the cause of Minette's death, is really a summation of what lies at the heart of the novel and it's real message as a work of fiction.

I don't want to spoil the novel by giving too much away but Oates uses the background of Genna's family and the fallout from the end of the Nixon administration to make a very telling point about American life during the `70's. The novel is about much more than just the lives of two girls in their freshman year at college, and this is one of Oates's great strengths as a writer. She uses a simple premise for a story and uses it to make a significant social point or observation.

In a recent interview Oates said that the novel is loosely based on an actual event at an American college, and indeed the book's dedication - in memoriam - "Minette" - gives us a clue that once more Oates is using fiction to pass comment on how history can tell us so much about how life has become what it is today.

It is a fine novel and one I would recommend to Oates fans of old, as well as those wanting to sample something by one of the true giants of modern literature.

Roads to tragedy paved with good intentions
The year is 1974/5. Genna Meade comes from a liberal American family. Her father is a prominent radical lawyer, preachy in private as well as in public life, revered by some and hated by others, and has made a name for having helped draft-refusers from the recently ended Vietnam War. He is often away from home, his whereabouts not known even to his family. Genna's mother is an unhappy and lonely middle aged hippy with a drug problem. Genna herself is a fresher at Schuyler College, a liberal arts women's college in New York state, and in her application form had said she would like to share rooms with someone from an ethnic minority. Her room mate is a black scholarship student, Minette Swift. Minette is an unattractive, unhappy, touchy, fiercely private and intensely religious young woman who rejects friendly approaches, however hard Genna tries; and she is unpopular even with the other black girls in the dormitory of Haven House.

The first half of the novel has little plot development: settings are sharply observed, and it concentrates on bringing to life these people and their relationships with each other, very successfully, if perhaps by means of a little too much repetition. In particular, one begins to wonder how Genna can put up with Minette's repeated rebuffs. She feels protective of her and at the same time is afraid of her, and she feels guilt, inculcated by her father, about being white.

Then, half way through the book, the story becomes increasingly tense and sinister, as both racism and radicalism move more centre-stage. We have been told in the very first paragraph of the book that Minette will die; and yet her last day, graphically as it is described, is not the end of the book. There is an even more horrendous and quite unexpected tragedy to follow in the Epilogue. To say any more would be a spoiler.

A powerful and haunting book which draws you deeply into what it describes.