Dying Inside by Robert Silverberg
302 pages
Published 1972
Read from April 4 to April 7
Rating: ★★★½ out of 5
White male writers of the '60s and '70s (and '80s, for that matter, and many would argue they never ceased) tried way too hard when they attempted to portray the thoughts and perspectives of women and Blacks and homosexuals. Female characters in their hands are always thinking of conception and ovulation and menstruation; Black men are always angry and wanting a chance to knock Whitey down, and fall naturally into jive talk in their inner monologues. A writer like Dick, in my experience, avoids this problem by making all his POV characters straight white men, but Silverberg's tale of a mindreader whose powers are fading in the turbulent '70s can't exactly skirt the issue. I didn't exist during the era, of course; my generation seems to have a misplaced proxy nostalgia for the decade, ignoring the fact that it was kind of a shitty time thanks in large part to the still-raw social upheavals and the bitter distrust each social group had for all the others. I don't know how anyone thought back then, not really. But the misguided earnestness of White male writers does not seem like it would be an accurate measure of what everyone else was really up to.
A climactic scene in which (spoilers) David Selig gets jumped and beaten by a Black basketball squad, in particular, seems like the sort of thing dreamed up by paranoid Whites having to navigate a new social order, rather than a thing that would actually happen. Again, I never lived through those times, but I have a suspicion that Black-on-White violence has always been shouted from the rooftops while hardly ever occurring on the streets, a fear fermented by the image of a servile class finally starting to assert itself. Parallels to White America's hysterical reaction to a half-Black president in the current decade are obvious enough to be redundant. Whitey never let go of his memories of domination, sadly.
Like The Lathe of Heaven, Dying Inside was talked up by Jo Walton's narrator in Among Others. And overall Dying is an excellent novel, a moving (and unusual-for-its-genre) character study on aging and the deterioration of the self, themes I find particularly relatable these days. Its confused and problematic racial overtones are hard to ignore, however. I feel like I should find some contemporary Black fiction as a chaser (not to mention my need to read Black fiction for its own sake).
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