Let’s get one thing straight right off the bat: I love love LOVE the yearly Tournament of Books at The Morning News. The March-madness conceit of pitting the best books of the year in a bracket-style tournament is brilliant. In its championship round, it has consistently steered me toward some of the best books I’ve read in recent years.
But the major weakness of the tournament is that the whole thing can be completely undone by one judge—and that is exactly what appears to have happened in today’s round of the Tournament, in which Stephin Merritt of the Magnetic Fields judged Roxane Gay’s An Untamed State vs. Anthony Doerr’s All The Light We Cannot See. In fact, though it’s still early in the year, I’m calling it: Merritt has written the most boneheaded, tone-deaf, willfully offensive piece of book criticism that I or anyone else will read this year, in which he criticizes two novels about gang rape and World War II, respectively, because they’re not funny enough.
“Humorless” is the word he used. Given the subject matter, I think both novels should be forgiven for not having a lot of laughs.
Here’s Merritt (trigger warning—rampant stupidity ahead):
It is not clear to me who Gay’s intended readership is. So ugly and revolting is the Haiti she describes, that her book could have been financed by the tourism council of a rival destination. The protagonist, Mireille, is an entitled lawyer from a wealthy Haitian family, arrogant and unlovable, with a puzzling habit of running away so that her fiancé has to go in search of her. For no reason. Her complete absence of introspection only increases throughout the novel as she is kidnapped, raped, and tortured for 12 days, leaving her mangled and insane. Then, because she is insane, she runs away some more.
I don’t even know where to begin. It’s not entirely clear to me what Merritt’s criticism is here; he seems to think that because he didn’t particularly enjoy An Untamed State or its main character, that makes it, and her, inherently bad. (Someone should point him to the many intelligent analyses of whether “likability” should matter in fiction; among them Gay’s own.) Mireille may occasionally lack introspection, I suppose—that’s a subjective matter—but Merritt shows himself to be completely lacking in empathy, which is perhaps the most important quality in people who endeavor to read and gain anything from books about experiences different from their own. If he had approached the novel with any empathy, he might have understood that Mireille’s situation is one not particularly conducive to introspection, and that she later runs away from her fiance so often not because she’s “crazy” (seriously, what an asshole) but because she’s probably got PTSD.
The most mystifying paragraph, for me, was the following:
Somehow the whole mess gets blamed on her father, who takes 12 days to pay Mireille’s million-dollar ransom (though how quickly he could or should have paid it, we are never told). The craven moral of the story seems to be, pay anyone who kidnaps your relative a million dollars as quickly as possible, ignoring the fact that they will then kidnap your other relatives, or even the same one again, as is repeatedly pointed out throughout this exhaustingly unpleasant book.
I honestly don’t know what to say here. The “moral” Merritt attempts to put his finger on is actually one of the tensions of the story: Mireille’s father refuses to pay the ransom, but Gay takes pains to establish that he has his own reasons for doing so having to do with his background and his attitude toward his wealth. The resulting picture is of a woman caught in between men’s violence and a man’s scruples—a potentially rich vein of meaning, had Merritt bothered to mine it.
Merritt ultimately gives the match to Doerr because, as far as I can tell, All the Light We Cannot See was enjoyable sometimes and had this one funny part.
How someone who so clearly hates books and is seemingly incapable of reading them intelligently was assigned to judge a book tournament in one of its final rounds is a mystery for another day.
Reblogged this on Gently Read Literature.