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book reviews DEFYING GRAVITY Erin Aubry Kaplan The Girl Who Fell From the Sky By Heidi W. Durrow Algonquin Books DISTINGUISHED BY POETIC INTE- rior monologues, short but cine- matic chapters and characters sug- gested rather than drawn, Durrow’s novel is a welcome entry in the crucial but cliché-prone genre of American race narra- tives. Based on a real incident, it tells the story of Rachel, the pubescent daughter of Roger, a black GI, and a Danish woman, Nella, who meet at an overseas military base and eventually marry. The relationship is troubled from the start, and after the couple moves to the U.S. in the 1980s, things really fall apart. They split, and Nella struggles to find her footing in a strange land made stranger by the fact that she’s no longer a Dane, but a foreign white woman living in largely black Chicago with biracial children who are simply regarded as a lighter shade of Negro. In a tragedy of Greek pro- portions that drives the book, Rachel loses her family; the lone survivor, she is shipped off to her paternal grandmother in Portland. It is in this improbable place where her life as a black girl officially begins. Rachel hardly knows what to make of her circumstances, though she learns to keep up appearances, the first of many lessons about living black and in the permanent shadow between poor and doing all right. The deprivation is not just economic. Her Southern-born grandmother www.msmagazine.com dotes on her pretty hair—non-kinky, non-black—but Rachel hears only the absence of comparison with Nella’s. “She doesn’t say anything about my mother, because we both know that the new girl has no mother,” Rachel notes. “The new girl can’t be new and still remember. I am not the new girl. But I will pretend.” Durrow’s greatest strength as a writer is patience. Rachel’s voice is at first detached to the point of being out of body; as she ma- tures and begins to un- derstand what she came from and who she is, she absorbs the new truths around her with less fear and more cu- riosity. Even in her tightly limned black world, there is variety and humor, poignancy and absurdity: her Aunt Loretta’s restless ambi- tion to become an artist; Loretta’s boyfriend Drew’s ef- forts to transmit his political activism to his own indifferent, teenage daughter; Grandma’s debilitating nips at the sherry bottle that she calls her “contributions.” Rachel accepts this odd new life and at times even loves it, but she is held at arm’s length by both blacks and whites who see her difference and expect her to act ac- cordingly. The Girl Who Fell From the Sky is that rare thing: a post-postmodern novel with heart that weaves a circle of stories about race and self-discovery into a tense and some- times terrifying whole. Yet it follows an old thematic tradition in American lit- erature that being black is by defini- tion a tragedy. However one comes by one’s blackness—Rachel “fell” into it from another country—it is always something to escape, to struggle against and, finally, to endure. We may be in the age of Obama, but the troubled black story from which we like to imagine we’ve liberated our- selves lives on. ERIN AUBRY KAPLAN is a contributing editor to the op-ed section of the Los Angeles Times. DEAD WOMAN TALKING Gaiutra Bahadur Till We Can Keep an Animal By Megan Voysey-Braig Jacana Media NEAR THE END OF THIS DEBUT novel, the daughter of a rape victim sits in a circle of gangsters smoking crystal meth in the Cape Flats, a place freighted with the injustices of South African history. In real life, its slums, sequestered between city and sea on the outskirts of Cape Town, rose up to house many of the 60,000 people kicked out of District Six when the apartheid regime claimed their central-city neighborhood exclusively for whites in 1966. The daughter, Imogen, received in the housing projects as a “white woman with a clipboard,” is there for research, and sitting next to her on a fold- ing chair, cleaning a gun, is her mother’s rapist and murderer. She doesn’t know this. The narrator, who does, says: “What if he drew that gun he was cleaning and put it to her head, hold- ing it like some American gangsta rap star? Not even our gangs can be original.” FALL 2009 | 55