2014 read #44: Boy, Snow, Bird by Helen Oyeyemi.

Boy, Snow, Bird by Helen Oyeyemi
309 pages
Published 2014
Read from May 14 to May 16
Rating: ★★★½ out of 5

I'm going to talk mostly about the ending of this book, so if you worry about spoilers, be warned.

The primary difference between genre fantasy (no matter how skillfully written) and literary fiction (no matter most fantastical) is the care taken to spell out to the reader exactly what emotions are in play, who feels what toward whom, and how the reader is supposed to feel about it. Literary fiction leaves everything it can to the reader to figure out. A consequence of this is that, in my limited experience, modern literary novels tend to end in a puff, as if a revery or memory is broken and you're left blinking and trying to catch fragments of what seemed so real and important just a moment before. A haze of impressions and subconscious magic dissolves into something abruptly banal, like when Amal gets on Noman's bike at the end of The Geometry of God, or when Parrot visits Olivier after Parrot's happy elopement in Parrot & Olivier in America, or when Maja simply gets over her spiritual malady at the end of The Opposite House.

Well, let me walk back my "primary difference" talk just a little -- this puff-of-air ending seems to be a modern stylistic affectation, not a necessary concomitant of the category. But anyway. My point is, the mystery and half-seen symbols of even the most potent literary work tend to vanish at some point near the end, as if ending with a decisive and cathartic fulfilment of that imagery is déclassé. That deflationary trend makes me worry when I near the end of a literary novel published in the last twenty or so years. But I never would have guessed what form that would take in Boy, Snow, Bird.

I'm hardly the first to worry that Oyeyemi's choice of direction in the last twenty or so pages is transphobic. After all, I'm a straight cis-sexual man -- if it's obvious to me, it's no wonder "boy snow bird transphobic" is one of the top Google autocompletes when you type the title. The part of me that likes to stick to textual readings feebly tried to argue that Boy is an unreliable narrator, that the rat-catcher is meant to be a specific character and not a sweeping generalization... but after putting The Golden Torc on hold to read this book after some particularly nasty and blatant transphobia made me lose my taste for May's Pliocene Exile, that textual-reading part of me isn't especially vocal. The stereotype of transexualism-as-mental-illness or transexualism-as-traumatic-disturbance is very much alive and very much in any given writer's mind. The Frances/Frank revelation adds nothing to the characters of Boy, Snow, or Bird, and comes as a post hoc addendum to a story far better without it.

And damn it, Boy, Snow, Bird was sooooo fucking good up until that point. Seriously good. If I were writing this later, after I had time to let the ending percolate and poison my impressions of the foregoing narrative, I'd probably rate this much lower, but as it is the good stuff is still fresh in my mind, as if it and the Frances/Frank stuff came from wholly different books, wholly different authors. Such a disappointment.