Allison, Dorothy. Bastard out of Carolina. New York: Plume, 1993.

I Finished! this one a couple weeks ago. Maybe last week. The following evening I saw Dorothy Allison give a talk at UNL's annual GLBTQIAAQ??? dinner about ... well as with the first time she spoke here a couple years ago I can't quite recall what it was about, but I know it was incredibly moving and inspirational, in the way sermons probably are. Why couldn't her book be? At the dinner, she spoke about a woman estranged from her daughter because she (the daughter) was gay. She spoke about how happy she is that Nebraska has such a liberal Safe-Haven law, because infants aren't the only one who need last-ditch solutions.

Allison's central theme in the speech, and here in this, her first novel, and I think in much of the writing that's come since, is family. Indeed, a friend of mine had lunch with Allison on the day she spoke and the words "You've got to love your family" came out of her mouth at one point. And I do. I do love my family. But I also love...I dunno myself or my life enough to know that if that family ever betrayed me in any way I could take that love away and feel all the stronger for it. I'm aware that for anyone potential conditions exist such that they didn't have to love their families.

Maybe it's the uninterrupted love my family's given me that allows me to feel this way. One thing I know for sure is that Bastard out of Carolina is, in the end, a very conservative book. Its focus is on the family. Ruth Anne Boatwright is a girl born the titular bastard to a teenage mother, Annie, and an absent father. The mother remarries after she has another kid with a man who dies, and this man she marries—Daddy Glen—turns out in what has now become a cliche in the memoir/autobionovel genre to be abusive. First it's verbal/emotional, then it becomes physical/sexual. All the while, Annie turns a blind eye, or sees what's going on and gets really upset but then goes crawling back to Daddy Glen because she can't stand to be alone. The novel ends with this reconciliation between daughter and mother than rang, to me, completely false and sentimental. "You're my own baby girl," Annie says. "I'm not gonna let you go." And the line is so clearly another lie, yet Ruth Anne does everything in her narration to assert that this time she believed it, and therefore we should.

Another problem I had with the book was its point of view. I don't remember what the problem was, exactly, just that a problem was had. I think it had something to do with the fact that for much of the book Ruth Anne doesn't do anything but watch her colorful family members yell and lie at one another. And then this combined with the book's insistence that we never question Ruth Anne's perspective on herself and the events of her narrative. It's like this depressing by-product of the Victim Narrative That Resists At All Costs Being Labeled A Victim Narrative. I fully submit that this is a matter of personal taste, not one of literary ideals or whatever.

Like, I like my first-person narrated novels to be a bit more aware of the inherent unreliability of every first-person narrator ever. Bad memoirs are completely ignorant of this. "I" am witness, they say. "I" will tell you what you need to know. Novels, though, usually know better. Or, at least, they should.

UPDATE: This is unfair and snarky of me but I'm in the sort of mood where I can't resist. From a Goodreads review of this book (5-star): "To read what happens to her page after page literally cracks your heart open and I find myself begging in my mind with the author (even though it's far too late!) 'Please don't let her get raped'. She does get raped...."

Am I a dick to assert that there's something, well "wrong" about any novel that, if even unintentionally, drives a reader to beg for a main character not to get raped? Is it like begging for certain characters not to die by a novel's end? Or is it something else?