Paperback America

Writer and academic Jay Parini’s latest effort is a delightful assortment of books that, he believes, capture the essence of American society and history. Some of Parini’s choices may seem eccentric, but none of the 13 books in this collection can be called lightweight against the rather tough standards by which the author measures them.

The title, referring to Mary Antin’s The Promised Land, harks to the immigrant’s experience in America, a society where “except for native Americans, everyone is an immigrant or the descendant of immigrants”. Continuing in this vein, Parini also includes William Bradford’s

Of Plymouth Plantation, a founding text about the original Pilgrims, “one of those primal stories that have shaped our sense of who we are”.

The other major American issue that Parini sees fit to tackle is race. Both Uncle Tom’s Cabin and The Souls of Black Folk find mention. While Parini is not entirely enthusiastic about the talents of Harriet Beecher Stowe, he nevertheless pays hearty tribute to the seminal contribution that Uncle Tom’s Cabin made on race relations in America.

Part of the charm of this well-written collection is Parini’s inclusion of such non-literary works as the global bestseller How to Win Friends and Influence People and The Common Sense Book of Baby and Child Care. Parini’s reason to include the latter is as much cultural as it is sociological. “As such,” Dr Spock’s treatise on baby care, “helped to shape the baby-boom generation, and its effects still reverberate.”

The collection also includes Walden, Thoreau’s vivid account of the pleasures of nature, Betty Friedan’s anti-patriarchy polemic, The Feminine Mystique, and On the Road.

Parini has a special gift to somehow locate common strands in the disparate works that make this collection. He expresses delight at discovering the mystical quality in the writings of Emerson and Thoreau, whose “independent, even rebellious, spirit” resonates in the writings of Mary Antin, Benjamin Spock, Jack Kerouac, and even in the defiance of Betty Friedan.

PROMISED LAND: THIRTEEN BOOKS THAT CHANGED AMERICA
Jay Parini
Doubleday
400 pages
$24.95

‘Whyte’ Awakening

Rewriting history in fiction has been a favourite pastime of countless authors. There have been several outings by writers in which the ascendancy of Hitler or a nuclear conflict between the United States and the erstwhile Soviet Union have provided rich pickings. Bernardine Evaristo’s sparkling new novel undertakes this project on a decidedly epic scale.

In the beginning, Blonde Roots is just another story of a girl abducted from the forest near her house and brought to the New World to work as a slave. The usual accoutrements of slave trade are in attendance, including rapacious masters, scheming mistresses and the mind-numbing pathos of the slaves’ deprivation. Doris, the slave girl brought into this shocking world, is just another cog in the wheel that drives the New World’s prosperity.

Except that Doris is white (or whyte, as Evaristo calls the race in a slice of pop revisionism), and her tormentors are blacks from “Aphrika”. Off the coast of Aphrika sits the island of the United Kingdom of Ambossa. There is also a map at the beginning of the book, in which the outlines of the world are jumbled to build an elaborate fiction in which migration of this sort — in the direction opposite to what history has laid out — could have happened.

The real triumph of Evaristo’s craft is her reimagining of the conventionalities of slave trade. Doris, who works at the house of the local chief, Bwana, dislikes her pale skin and blonde curls, and envies the rich “choco-colored” beauty of her mistress. This is taken to a more serious level when Bwana tries to justify the slave trade under the guise of the racial superiority of blacks.

Owing to the surreal quality of its prose, Evaristo’s deeply political writing is never far from endearing. Blonde Roots jolts the reader into looking at, and in turn learning from, history with new eyes.