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bvbuntin · 4 years ago

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Book Review: A Good Neighborhood by Therese Anne Fowler

I have not had much opportunity to read for fun since graduating college this spring. “Fun” is a very subjective word here, mostly referring to picking something not necessarily related to academia but laced with an underwritten tension of reading something relevant to current events. I ended up borrowing an ebook copy of A Good Neighborhood somewhat at random. I was not looking for anything “serious,” but at the same time, reading with a disconnection to literature’s political implications makes reading for fun—particularly after recently graduating with a degree in English—nearly impossible. Therefore, my conclusions from reading this novel reflect the often simultaneous pros and cons of producing racial discourse. A Good Neighborhood deals in racial politics as its explicit subject, but the narrative itself is also deeply embedded in unavoidable racial politics that may be detrimental to the issues it attempts to illuminate.

The story follows two families in a North Carolinian suburb. One family consists of widowed mother, Valerie, a professor of ecology, and her son Xavier, a freshly-graduated teen preparing to pursue his promising career in music at a school in San Francisco. Next door, the Whitman family has recently moved into their custom-built house: Julia, mother of teenage daughter Juniper, who married wealthy HVAC business-owner Brad and added their grade-school age daughter Lily. It is important to note that Valerie is black, her son Xavier being mixed (but for all intents and purposes, counted as black by society), while the Whitmans are white. Valerie sues Brad for damage caused during the construction of the Whitmans’ new home to the roots of her massive, ancient oak tree; at the same time, the teenagers, Xavier and Juniper, fall in love. The racial politics of the book are evident from the start, with Brad, for example, appearing to assume Xavier is hired help as he does yard work for his mother. Over the course of the novel, these racial dynamics escalate into the main conflict, and the story ends in tragedy.

It is impossible to understand the novel’s complexity without also understanding the circumstances under which the novel was written. Reading the beginning acknowledgements reveals some important information about the author: first, she is white, and second, she wrote this novel for its relevancy to current issues in the hopes of spurring conversation about race. I would be interested to have had the experience of reading the novel without knowing such information first. Whatever the case, this story about racial politics is itself steeped in the racial politics which birthed it.

The novel exhibits an awareness of the many dimensions of power. For example, race, class, education, gender, and life experience all compound to complicate relations between the families. For example, Julia Whitman and her daughter Juniper both experienced a large class jump when Julia married Brad. Julia used these newfound opportunities to place Juniper in a religious program meant to support teenage girls in the way that religious programs often do: emphasizing traditional gender roles and conducting ceremonies such as making a purity vow with her stepfather Brad. We also see that Valerie and her son deviate from the poor urban stereotype often associated with POC: Valerie is a single black mother working as a college professor in STEM, and Xavier has received a generous scholarship to pursue his love of music at a school in San Francisco.

And yet, some of these aspects can feel heavy-handed. Is Xavier portrayed as a “good kid” because of author bias toward what constitutes the “proper conduct” of a POC in society? Does he obtain a scholarship because, as the societal narrative goes, hard work always pays off (no matter your race or privilege)? Readers cannot be certain, but the questions remain. These multi-faceted power dynamics, on the one hand, capture the complexities that arise from conflict, as they do in real life. On the other hand, the presence of these traits may at times reduce characters to tokens, making them feel more like the sum of their traits (as given to them by a white author) rather than complex characters.

The narration style of the novel provides an interesting perspective into racial tension. Written in the collective first person perspective “we,” it is the titular neighborhood that narrates the story. The omnipresent perspective is offset by explicit reminders that neighborhood, despite its collective and wide perspective, is ultimately limited by the boundaries of privilege and the limitations of the human perspective. Though at times the narrative seems to provide a neutral understanding of the situation, we are reminded that this neutrality is not total: the narrative perspective exemplifies the collective consciousness of white society when faced with issues of race. This type of narrative perspective enables the narrative to draw explicit attention to overt and covert racism in ways which feel a bit more organic than if an impersonal third-person narrative were to suddenly launch into an explanation about racism.

There are pros and cons to explicit acknowledgement of racism in narrative: on the one hand, racism often acts very covertly, and pointing it out explicitly means one is aware of the narrative they are narrating/writing and wants to make their readers aware of the issue rather than hoping (white) people will pick up on it. On the other hand, it may make the writing feel inauthentic, a moral lesson to be conveyed, which the collective narrative style mitigates but does not do away with altogether. The novel’s resigned ending feels intimidated by its own implications, edging into the all-too-common resolution of “let us witness the tragedy inherent in being black and use it to make us all more conscientious people.” Such a resolution leaves too much at stake for very real issues of systemic racism and violence, sacrificing the individual for the sake of the whole and reproducing the violence it attempts to combat.

When I was about halfway through the novel, I was chatting with a friend who suggested we start a book club. Because I was reading A Good Neighborhood, I suggested this novel. Upon completing the novel, I feel like I would genuinely discourage my friend from reading this book. What concerns me about this specific novel is that this novel’s reality is not what we need right now, especially in the realm of fiction. Not that creating a fictional racism-free world is the answer—such a perspective exemplifies white desire to simply make the problem go away, to rectify without facing reality—but one must ask the question about how effective repeatedly reiterating the violence enacted on black bodies is in the fiction genre. Coupled with the fact that most readers may not dwell on the complexities of the internal narrative and the external politics that produced it, I do not feel the book is productive for racial discourse and runs a high risk of only adding to the trauma that our society forces black persons to confront daily, ultimately desensitizing us to reality. Though there are black characters and references and quotes to the work of famous black activists, the book lacks a black voice, which I believe it what we need most right now.

I would not prioritize this book on your to-read list. If you choose to read this book, make sure you do not read it in a vacuum. Read what other people—especially POC—have to say about such books. Better yet, read novels and essays by POC. If you are looking to understand racism through literature, there are far better options. This book may serve better as an example of how white writers attempt to talk about race with varying degrees of success.

I understand that this is a difficult subject matter to handle, and I understand that a novel cannot cover everything. However, I think considering all the facets of the narrative, and the circumstances which produced the narrative, is what ultimately produces a productive reading. I am just unsure how many people will have the time or knowledge to do such work, and therefore would recommend other works before this one.

Check out this book on Goodreads

#book reviews #bri's reviews #racism #fiction books #realistic fiction books #ya fiction books

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mcleanstanley1991 · 4 years ago

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Reiki Healing Anxiety Eye-Opening Diy Ideas

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Reiki Healing Omaha

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Reiki Symbol Kriya

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#Reiki Healing Anxiety Eye-Opening Diy Ideas #Reiki Healing Austin

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homewecomesblog · 4 years ago

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johnfmyles · 4 years ago

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Albinati’s The Catholic School

Albinati’s The Catholic School is a huge rambling novel, pretty much damned by Colm Toibin in a recent NYRB for its imprecision and sheer length. I found this book important because of what it conveys to the reader about western cultural, bourgeois, and general social conditions providing the grounds for rape and the deeply-ingrained misogynistic male mind-set underlying it. Although the nomination of the Catholic School in the title of the novel might suggest that this is the key institutional source for that culture of rape and violence towards women, it actually isn’t key. Rather culture, psychology of the mid-20th century male and the bourgeois family, come across as the more significant sources - the actual ‘schools’ for rape.

At places in this novel, as it lumbers relentless along, Albinati’s narrator, a writer and sometime prison lecturer, as if to remind himself stops and states what he thinks the novel is all about:

“The story that his book is going to tell, alongside other stories, ought to show how, on at least one occasion, on the basis of groundwork laid long ago by numerous contributing factors, around the middle of the eighth decade of the last century - the 1970s - the priest’s got their formula wrong.”

This might seem to suggest that rape culture is a question of schooling, pedagogy, particularly of the catholic school variety, a view that Toibin seems to follow when he blames the institution, comparing the Catholic school to the boarding school bullying in Musil’s in Young Torless. But then:

“The central story of this book will confirm that you can be obedient students by day and nevertheless go out to kidnap and rape underage girls by night.”

So, maybe we think this is going to be about conformity, like Moravia’s The Conformist. No, or not really, although it is about rape culture. Then he says, again trying to keep a grip on his subject:

“This book of mine also belongs to the genre of true crime exploitation, though at arms’ length, as we’ll see.”

But again, not really, or not so consciously as this suggests. So the writer/narrator’s summary posts did not help this reader and their status is like that when at one point the narrator asks himself as he rambles on:

“Does it have anything to do with the events described in this book? Yes and no.”

This is often the case, one has to plough on in the rambling reflections of the writer/narrator. But it is correct I think that that which ineluctably shapes the phenomenon of rape, is a shape which is complex, irregular, and just cannot be understood pat.

So the story of The Catholic School may seem to be about a single act - the notorious kidnapping and rape of two young girls and the murder of one of them. One might say agreeing with the narrator that this event is the ‘axis’ of the novel, appearing as it does well into it. This is the CR/M (the Circeo/Criminal rape and murder) that is constantly, fleetingly, referred to in the lead up and the aftermath sections of the novel/book (this seems to be Albinati’s own ambivalence about the genre of The Catholic School). [SPOILER ALERT FOR THE REST OF THIS PARAGRAPH] The CR/M is described as monstrous, a dreadful assault, notorious and widely shocking late 1970s Italy, a huge event. But, strangely, when the event actually arrives and is described it is conveyed in prose and style that is almost pedestrian and the act seems ambiguous, non-specific in depiction. It is pretty anti-climatic and the reader feels something is missing. Certainly, by this stage any idea that the novel belongs to the genre of ‘crime exploitation’ goes totally out of the window because it isn’t lurid or graphic.

I was puzzled by what Albinati was doing. He signalled that this is a novel about the real crime, that which all of Italy knew about, but 90% of the 1200 pages hardly touch the actual crime. And many of what are presented as integral dimensions of the CR/M are also never fully developed. One would think that maybe theological-ethical questions of sin and guilt might be integral, especially as many of the elements of the story seem to arise from the Catholic school and the behaviour fostered there either by the priest/teachers or by the particularities of the cohort that included the rapists or their associates. But sin is rarely mentioned as a concept in the novel - just 92 times in all (such counts being one of the benefits of reading this as an ebook, alongside not having a doorstopper in one’s lap) and in nearly all senses is inconsequential when it does appear.

Similarly, porn, surely at its apogee in the 1970s, at least in terms of its crudest and casual forms of objectification of women and girls, although regularly addressed as an issue by the narrator, tends to take a secondary role. He notes the affinity press reporting and crime fiction, have in feeding on the porn industry:

“…the flesh trade, continues to expand limitlessly until an unbroken pornographic continuum that takes in territories of crime reporting, given that these territories are where excitement runs most unbridled, expertly camouflaged behind the mortal condemnations that we customarily reserve for true sties and events…”

Porn is thus seen as a reflection of the broader culture of abuse and hatred of women underlying the individual CR/M, but it isn’t the essential issue (as, say, 1970s feminist writers like McKinnon had it) - it has only the status of being a reflection of a much broader, institutional, problem.

Also of really only secondary consideration is the role/legacy of Fascism in the broader ‘field’ of the crime (I use 'field' in the way Bourdieu uses it. At places Albinati seems to refer to Bourdieu’s sociology. He talks, for instance, of intellectuals being the ‘dominated fraction’ of the dominant class, a phrase that echoes the French sociologist, and Albinati is very much a sociological novelist.) Fascism is discussed at some length around half-way through the novel. There seems to be an underlying epistemology at work here which privileges form over content, and in relation to fascism this is presented as:

“Fascism in fact constitutes the dilemma of unrepresentability; and perhaps for that reason, it loved to depict itself in whole healthy forms. The specificity of fascism is that it is, as we say of certain diseases, non-specific, which means that it does not consist of its ideology, but rather the way it conducts around that ideology an action and an identity.”

This view of signfication, of significance of form over content, reveals much about how the writer sees the world. It also explains the sort of novel The Catholic School is: where any meaning of anything like the CR/M has to be situated in the widest of sociologically-understood landscapes.

So porn, fascism, sin/morality, seem to be only elements in this landscape or field of rape, rather than either central or critical figures that might explain it alone. But although the field of the CR/M is presented in the broadest, most rambling of terms, there are significant features in the field. As a sociological novel the characters are nearly all ‘flat’. Plot is also substituted with the delay and then denouement of the actual CR/M. There are few topographical descriptions of place and little or any real feel for the flow of time. But Albinati states at one point “now we come to the bourgeois family that this book is about…” and what the novel is good at is in the analysis of the bourgeois family’s role in the field of rape, its role in setting the behaviour marking male sexuality and sexual aggression. Even in Italy the 1970s was a time when society was becoming more permissive, but the consequences were ambiguous:

“Free to do what? Many of us experienced scraps of old-style family oppression, hybridized or alternating with a permissiveness that was the product still of our parents’ specific beliefs…”

But this period is seen by the narrator as a time when fathers, ‘sires’ as he calls them, become something of a ‘nullity’, and compared to mothers in the novel, hardly figure except for (the Huck Finn' boy) Arbus’s whose dad publicly in the Rome press announces his homosexuality and abandons his family for a gay lifestyle. Albinati develops this theme when he evokes Thomas Mann and Moravia in the sections on the role of the bourgeois family. From Mann, he argues our understanding of the centrality of the bourgeois family:

“It is therefore a class that progresses by contradicting itself, that defines itself by its opposite. Perhaps that is why as…Thomas Mann maintains, it is the class with the greatest number of points of contact and things in common with the human race as a whole.”

An overstatement, but with some element of insight, at least in regard to white 1970s’ European societies like Italy. In relation to Moravia, Albinati argues that, in fact, indifference is seen as part of the legacy of the 60s (“a new attitude surfaced in the history of family relations, namely indifference, a reluctance to interfere, to judge…”) but it is not really as significant as Moravia made it out to be:

“…if only the sin of the bourgeois was indifference…if only the Bourgeois really did let life slide off his back…Quite the contrary, there is no creature on earth more highly alert than he. His existence unfolds under the banner of an incessant comparison and measurement between himself ad others.”

The character of the male progeny of the bourgeois family, then, is located as a key factor configuring the wider culture/field of rape - this is the class figure seen by Albinati as the epicentre of the contemporary manifestation of rape as a social phenomenon. The bourgeois male is the one who is particularly ‘fucked up’ by the retrogression of father figures. So this is a very conservative position and feminist historians, analysers of patriarchy might have something to add or contest here. But, perhaps, it is balanced by the odd, strange, obsession in the novel, only indirectly addressed as a causal factor in rape culture (as is the case with most of Albinati’s opinions.)

This is the figure of the bourgeois mother (again, and aside, it is strange that Toibin did not pick up on this in his NYRB’s review, given his own perceptive work on the literary and other influences of mothers.)Throughout the novel many of the schoolboys’ mums are depicted as being sexually attractive to the boys. The boys consciously note the way mums dress, their attractiveness, their sexual allure. The boy Max’s mum is described as having “bronzed shoulders, her bronzed back, the neckline that revealed freckled flesh…”. I found it hard to believe that real boys consider their own, or their mates’ mothers in this way - surely they were more likely to see them as nonentities, like their fathers. Falling somewhat into cod-psychology Albinati directly evokes the figure of the mother as a deep psychological animus in the boys’ sexuality:

“It is the angry bite to the mother’s breast. By brutalising that breast, we escape from the figure that dominated the most important years of our lives. We take vengeance on our mother by devastating the wombs of women…”.

So, related to this, we find that Stefano, one of the rapists, is reported to have had sex with the mother of one of the other boys. But the psychology here seems weak, a bit crass, a repercussion of the general flatness of characters in this novel. But in a surprising reversal the narrator states:

“In the early years of psychoanalysis, people learned for the first time that many non-sexual acts had a hidden sexual source; now, in contrast, we realise that may sexual behaviours have a non-sexual motivation.”

But into this Freudianism gets mixed the underlying epistemology of form over content we have seen at work in the novel. So it is not the content, sexual gratification of any particular sexual form, but sex as a container for apparently non-sexual motivations. Sex between men and women is actually, then, a displacement of what Albinati calls ‘penis embarrassment’ - something that he sees as common to all (bourgeois) men. Women, in contrast, are seen by men as psychically-threatening because of they have no immediately visible sex organ. This absence is threatening to men whose sexuality is based fundamentally on symbolism that is phallic.

So the young men at the catholic school are shown to be, a little like Moravia’s conformist, shy, burdened by the cultural demands associated with masculinity, fearful of being called, for example, ‘queer’ (‘if anything what we did hate was the thought that we might be taken for queers…’) because it is the form, here queerness, rather than the actuality which is the more significant, cultural, sociological, animus. So, when the narrator goes to high school he befriends a gym teacher who is also a painter of nudes, nicknamed Courbet because of his subject matter, the nude and female sexual organ (as in Courbet’s ‘Origin of the World’.) The female sexual organ is described, though, as a ‘gross field of nothingness’ and Courbet argues that all men are basically queer or half-queer and that when having sex with women they are really in auto-erotic stimulation. They also are seen as being/becoming androgynous:

“…men who really like women sooner or later desire not only to have women, but also to be women…”

In the Catholic school it was ‘alright to be half-queers…but not an iota more’. If you were becoming identified there as a ‘faggot’, however, you had to find some other boy to bully and call a faggot.

These are some features of the cultural and social field that Albinati situates the singular act of rape and murder in the CR/M. The purported centrality of the Catholic school, given so much significance in the novel’s title, is not really the key locus for understanding the crime. The crime itself is diminished, a mere cameo appearance in the much broader field of bourgeois culture, a culture marked by a warped form of male sexuality. The actual ‘school’, then, is not the Catholic SLM Institute, but the ‘school’ of a bourgeois familial culture that forms its young men into a perversely misogynistic mind-set, a warped psyche, a sexuality where rape and a murderous compulsion to dominate/deny women’s own sexuality is inevitable.

Yet the figures of the priests at the school are interesting in so much as they seem to represent, consolidate or configure many of the factors of bourgeois toxic masculinity that the novel traces. If actual fathers are very much absent in the novel, the priests appear in the guise of old-fashioned, Thomas Mann’ types of bourgeois respectable fathers (their tunics ‘inspire[d] respect in me…’.) This is shown to be an illusion at the end of the novel when the narrator recalls what happened at a school camp and he reflects more broadly on the priests’ ‘mutilating’ vow of celibacy:

“what moral authority might I acknowledge, for what reason on earth should I allow myself to be guided, aided, instructed or even just advised by a man who has so horribly mutilated himself? By giving up the only thing that makes this beastly life worth living at all, namely, love?”

He goes on:

“This is not renunciation, cecil nest pas une pipe: there are times when Catholicism appears to be a forerunner of surrealism.”

The pedagogy of the Catholic school is based fundamentally on type of muscular christianity. But this ‘formula’ is seen as wrong, and perhaps allied with the perversity of the priestly life, this much at least is a part of the ��story this book is [going] to tell…’

But sociologically the ‘school’ of rape is much larger than the school run by the priests - it is an entire social field, a moral field corrupted at its core - via the media, by salacious movies, the lurid sex-crime novel, ‘then you can see that the degree of moral involvement can stretch out to touch the whole of society’. The issue, the moral issue of rape is made up of the ‘absence’ of women; either at the catholic school, the absence of female genitalia, the absence of wives for priests, absence of women in the army (a lot in this novel about rape as an act of war):

“…in middle school it already starts to sound odd, it’s becoming increasingly clear that half the world is missing in there, but the unhappiness of developing male bodies is still thus protected from all embarrassing comparisons and can be vented almost entirely in sports and fisticuffs…”

Albinati offers no easy solutions - like a Bourdieusian (but passionate) sociologist he rather plots out the field of forces involved in the cultural, moral, political dimensions of rape culture. The contrast can be made to Ben Lerner’s Topeka School, a novel with similar concerns to The Catholic School. A recent review in the NYRB describes when the character Adam, like an avenging Adam, knocks the phone from the hand of a man who’d been abusing his female partner: the reviewer noting that the novelist’s position on western masculinity is captured in this action. But Albinati’s novel isn’t conclusive in that kind of way: it simply fizzles out. But for me, having endured the long meandering journey into the school of rape, I feel I have experienced many of the dimensions that go into making the culture of rape.

And for me this is the reason why The Catholic School is an important novel, with an important moral purpose. Yet the actual language, diction and syntax, of the writing betrays the lesson. There are long sections, particularly in the last third of the novel, when the narrator describes his sexual affairs with women. The prose in these sections is unconsciously (?) objectifying of women:

“I slid into her. She gasped. She held her breath. And with her voice in a falsetto she asked if it had excited me to hear about Romina, about the two of them together. Had she done it intentionally? ‘Do you…do you want me to tell you more…?’ ‘No. Shut up now’ - that wasn’t why. But she went on talking. And I went on fucking her…”

But maybe Albinati’s approach, mainly sociological, falters when it comes to producing a counterpoint, an alternative discursive, linguistic-syntactic, an alternative erotics to convey his argument - we have to look elsewhere (Kristeva?) for that.

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linnea92x790-blog · 7 years ago

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