A little while ago, I mentioned that I was reading Helen Oyeyemi’s Boy, Snow, Bird, on an open thread, a really interesting retelling of the Snow White fairy tale by a Nigerian-British novelist that engages issues of race in a way that very few fairy-tale retellings do (“The Glass Bottle Trick” by Nalo Hopkinson is a notable exception, and I know there are others). Angel H. posted and noted that she had read reviews saying the novel was transphobic–I was confused, because I was halfway through the book and there didn’t seem to be any trans-relevant content at all, but I promised that I would respond when I was done.
The thing is, there is no way for me to talk about this book with respect to race or trans-ness, without giving away some major spoilers, so please only read past the jump cut if you’re OK with that.
OK?
Spoilers, I really mean it.
OK, here we go.
I really love about 90% of this book, and then, to my mind, it all falls apart in the final chapter, which is, not coincidentally, where there is a big trans-related revelation. I’m not a fan of flinging in some major “surprise, so-and-so is trans!” as a plot twist at the end without any prior or subsequent consideration of what that means in general, and I really think it’s not only unearned here, but doesn’t do what Oyeyemi thinks it does (or so I assume–I assume from the fact that it’s in the final chapter and seems to trigger some kind of reconciliation among Boy, the stepmother, Snow, the stepdaughter, and Bird, Boy’s daughter and Snow’s sister, that it’s meant to explain some emotional issues, open up the potential for a new chapter in their lives, generally be a kind of resolution, and I think it fails utterly). I definitely think it’s an artistic failure.
And yeah, I can see how it’s transphobic as well. For me, the transphobia is less glaring than the artistic failure, no doubt in large part due to cis privilege and in small part due to the fact that I just don’t buy the revelation, don’t see it as relevant to the story, and on a fundamental level think it’s kind of bullshit, so it’s hard for me to see it as a real thing.
Let me give you a spoiler-iffic rundown. In 1953 or so, at 18, Boy Novak runs away from her very, very abusive ratcatcher father, on the Lower East Side of Manhattan (they’re not Jewish, but he is Hungarian) and winds up in a New England town. There she stays in a boarding house for a while and does various odd jobs, making friends and doing odd jobs. She meets Arturo, a local jewelry-maker, and after a beautifully drawn series of interactions, marries him, although she does not know if she loves him. She does love his 7-year-old daughter, Snow. Snow is preternaturally beautiful and angelic, and is the darling of her three grandparents, who live next door. After a year or so, Boy gives birth to a daughter who is very clearly of black descent, and it comes out that Arturo’s family has been passing for white, and is so committed to doing so that his parents disowned a daughter who could not pass and sent her away (it annoys me that we don’t find this out until about a third of the way through the book, and I think it is supposed to be a revelation, but the American edition gives this plot point away in the blurb). It also becomes clear that part of the reason for the grandparents’ adoration of Snow is that she can pass almost perfectly. After the birth of her daughter, Boy begins to resent Snow and the love her grandparents have for her, as their internalized racism cause them to reject their other granddaughter, who cannot pass. Boy sends Snow away to Boston to live with her aunt, the disowned daughter, and uncle, transforming her childhood utterly.
Snow is deeply hurt–she had adored Boy, thinking of her as a fairy-tale princess and doesn’t understand why she’s been sent away from her stepmother, her beloved father, the sister she loves, and her adoring grandparents. Eventually she and Bird get back in touch when Bird is around 10, and Snow, along with the aunt and uncle, Clara and John, come home for Thanksgiving.
During their visit, Frank stalks Boy and Bird, corners Bird, and coerces her into having lunch with him. He is appalled to learn that this black child is Boy’s daughter, tells her that her mother is “evil” (Boy is certainly fucked up, but no, not evil), and is run out of town by Arturo, who knows all about his abuse and is having none of it, thank you very much.
In the final chapter, Mia, a friend of Boy’s from the boarding house, who has become a journalist, meets with Boy. She has been looking into Boy’s family for a story she wanted to write and discovers that Frank Novak was born Frances Novak, and had been a a bright and charismatic young lesbian (in this version of trans-ness, Frances had identified firmly as a woman, as far as we know, up until the event I’m about to speak of) who made her way from working-class roots to doing a PhD in psychology at Columbia when she is raped by a fellow student. She finds herself traumatized and pregnant, and begins seeing a man in the mirror, and within months has dropped out of sight of all those who had known her and become Frank the ratcatcher. So, you can see the transphobic elements here, I think: trans-ness is the result of a trauma, and the trans-parent is evil and abusive.
This revelation is somehow supposed to be a major thing for Boy, and I’m not convinced that the novel doesn’t mean us to agree. Boy, however, is convinced that if she can just go back to her father and coax him into being her mother “again,” all will somehow be well. At which point, I say what? Who gives a fuck? This asshole beat you into unconsciousness several times, tried to drown you, and at one point, drugged you, tied you up, and almost had a starving rat eat through your face so that your boyfriend would no longer find you beautiful. He stalked you, rejected your daughter out of racism, and told her you were evil. Who gives a flying fuck what genitals he has? If this had been presented as Boy’s desperate need for parental love and approval after all these years, something that had been motivating her in her rejection of Snow, part of an ongoing search for a mother who could have protected her from her father’s abuse, it would make psychological sense to me. But I don’t see that here. Boy wonders in a couple sentences in the beginning what kind of mother would’ve left her with Frank, but that’s it. And it doesn’t seem to have anything to do with her relationships with Snow or Bird. Anyway, Boy takes Snow and Bird with her, and they get into the car to go back to NYC and find Frank and somehow “bring back” Boy’s “mother.”
The novel would’ve been so much better off without this nonsense. It adds nothing. It plays on transphobic tropes. And it has nothing whatsoever to do with the rest of the novel. This novel needed to resolve the relationships among Bird, Snow, and Boy. It needed to explain why Arturo allowed Boy to send his older daughter away for a decade.
But I can’t not recommend the book, either. Up until that last chapter, it’s really interesting and thoughtful. I find what it does with race fascinating. The relationships among the women are fascinating and full of misunderstanding. It’s very well written. Just skip the last chapter.