Your Face in Mine is a good novel. It's the first novel I have read since starting life on #theBside here in Vancouver - which is an unusually long interval for me to go without reading a novel. It was good to resume my reading life with a book that gives so much to think about.
Perhaps what strikes me the most about the book is that a quick scan of my search results for the title only gives the usual - a New York Times review (linked above), goodreads, amazon, Slate, the Los Angeles Times, etc. Given the the theme and content of Jess Row's book, it seems amazing that the book didn't make the news. Not just the news of book reviews and book clubs, but the news-news, the talking head and panel shows.
The book was published in 2014, and the Rachel Dolezal story broke in June 2015. Remember her? She was the white woman who 'became' an African American woman, even going so far as to be a leader for the NAACP. Her professional life fell apart when her parents spoke out to say that, yes, their daughter was white. As details emerged, it became clear that Dolezal had 'revised and edited' just about every aspect of her personal story. Some elements were deleted, others added, and a host of others were like Jack's magic beans. They became seeds for something much larger than life.
When the story broke, it consumed the mainstream media for a brief period. There were those who were simply fascinated, and then there were those who truly found the issues raised to be both intellectually and emotionally important. What is identity? If race is basically a social construct, are genetics really that important? Is it racist to appropriate someone's culture?
With all the attention her story garnered, I still can't believe that Jess Row and his novel Your Face in Mine didn't somehow leap to the fore of the media storm. Why? Okay, I deliberately postponed making the connection. Row wrote a novel that one would think would have been written immediately after the Dolezal 'scandal'. Instead, he wrote a novel about a white, Jewish man who, after a childhood and adolescence of 'racial dysphoria' seeks out the medical treatments necessary to become an African American man.
Now this book could have been nothing but a story revolving around the gimmick of adopting another racial identity. But there really isn't anything gimmicky about the book. Row's novel is serious, just as his character, Martin, is serious about the idea that he was basically born in the wrong body. It's a serious literary look at identity, at who we are and what we choose to be.
Martin, a stalwart capitalist, sees choice as the new frontier of identity. Now that medicine (in the novel) has unlocked the process by which we can become what we believe we are, a huge new market awaits. As part of his marketing strategy, Martin hires Kelly, the one connection to his past identity, to be his putative biographer and tell his story of disconnection, discovery, and transformation.
Kelly, weighed down by his own personal story of loss, is himself a man of complicated identity. A fluent Mandarin speaker with a now dead Chinese wife and child, he is adrift and alone. It's partly testament to Row's writing, that I didn't connect Kelly's experience to the idea of identity at all for at least half the novel. He is, at first, just a very sad man trying to create some kind of forward momentum for his life. As things unfold, however, Row begins to show how a sense of belonging is as much a part of identity (racial or otherwise) as anything else.
Like I said, it's a good book. I'm glad it didn't become popular because of Rachel Dolezal, but I am surprised that it didn't get more attention. After all, Row actually took the time to write a thoughtful novel that examines not only the concept of racial identity but what it means to all of us to be part of something larger than us. And he did it all before Rachel Dolezal's story broke.
I can't help but wonder if she has read it.
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