A Year of Comfort and
Discomfort
by Nisi Shawl
More this year than ever, much of my work involves
reading. In addition to the book reviews
I write and edit for The Seattle Times
and The Cascadia Subduction Zone, I’m
putting together two anthologies. Simultaneously. One is composed of reprints: “The Year’s
Illustrious Feminist Science Fiction and Fantasy.” But “Stories for Chip: A Tribute to Samuel R.
Delany” is meant to include mostly original prose, and reading those
submissions has at times been…unpleasant.
So I’ve taken frequent refuge in rereading books I know from past
encounters will afford me great, if sometimes guilty, pleasure. Comfort reads.
My first retreat into familiar literary waters was a couple
of weeks spent rereading Dorothy Sayers’ Lord Peter Wimsey books. This is, I think, my fourth go round with
them. If you know the delights of
dallying with this parfit gentil knight, you know how like a good soak and
loofah-scrub my self-indulgence was. My
mind positively glowed. I then succumbed to Georgette Heyer’s Regency
novels, ably assisted by Jo Walton’s Tor.com essays on their strengths and
weaknesses (http://www.tor.com/blogs/2012/03/how-i-stopped-worrying-and-learned-to-love-romance
is a good introduction to these).
Next I went through my shelfful of Dorothy Dunnett’s Dolly
mysteries--not to everyone’s taste, I know.
Then I seized on Austen--but limited myself to three of her six complete
novels: Mansfield Park, Northanger Abbey, and Persuasion. Mansfield
Park has long been my favorite Austen, despite other Jane-ites’ disdain for
the do-nothingness of its heroine, Fanny.
My last retrospective consisted of four of Angela Thirkell’s
Barsetshire novels: The Headmistress,
Pomfret Tower, The Brandons, and Before
Lunch. Set in Victorian author
Anthony Trollope’s fictional countryside, these early 20th century chronicles
of the vanished mundanities of Britain’s rural upper class fascinate me. The characters’ niggling worries about the
order of precedence observed on entering their dining rooms, their proclivities
for baths, their absurd vanities of dress and ridiculous (to me) concerns about
the very slightest increments of upward mobility vouchsafed by maidservants and
butchers, all distract me quite effectively from my own very different
problems.
Of course books are like rivers, and you can never enter the
same one twice. Along with the deep and
genuine comfort these rereads afforded me, I partook of at least attempted
professional analysis. Why did I like Mansfield Park best? How
did Sayers convey the physical sensations of being drawn unwillingly into
love? Which minutiae of the daily life of English gentry held the most
interest for me, and which the least?
You’ll likely have noticed all of the above-mentioned
authors are female. And white. These factors figure into my critiques of the
racial and gender politics of my mental comfort food, as I compare my former
lack of dismay over the calypso club antics of Dunnett’s hero Johnson Johnson
with my current annoyance at his arrogant and privileged behavior. Or my earlier acceptance of Thirkell’s
“spoiled” heroine Elsa Belton’s climactic self-effacement before her fiancé’s
assumption of superiority, and the unease it now raises in me.
There are a few lumps in the gravy, a couple of springs
poking against the upholstery of the
literary (not literal) couch on which
I’ve reclined.
My last recommendation is a new story by a black man which didn’t
comfort me at all, but which I found so excellent in every way that I offered
to stand by the phone to field calls of distress from readers I pointed it out
to. “The Devil in America,” by Kai
Ashante Wilson, depicts this country’s legacy of racial violence both
supernaturally and supernally. It was
published at Tor.com on April 2. Its
author attempts something I’ve never had the courage to try. In my opinion he succeeds, and he deserves to
win All The Awards. Every. Single. One.
Go to http://www.tor.com/stories/2014/04/the-devil-in-america-kai-ashante-wilson
and see what I mean.
Nisi Shawl is the author of Filter House, which won the James Tiptree Jr. Award and was nominated for the World Fantasy Award, Something More and More, her WisCon GoH collection, and, with Cynthia Ward, the co-author of the celebrated Writing the Other: A Practical Approach, and the editor of The WisCon Chronicles, Vol. 5: Writing and Racial Identity, all of which are published by Aqueduct Press. Last year Aqueduct Press published Strange Matings: Science Fiction, Feminism, African American Voices, and Octavia E. Butler, which Nisi co-edited with Rebecca Holden. She reviews science fiction for the Seattle Times,
is a member of the Clarion West board, teaches writing workshops at
Centrum in Port Townsend, WA., and is the reviews editor of The Cascadia Subduction Zone.
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