Tainting a good story with undercooked critical theory
Your response to this novel’s title, and specifically the word ‘postcolonial’, is likely to determine your subsequent enjoyment of the book. Because a novel that points knowingly at both its genre and its critical stance from before you even open it is making the reader certain guarantees. You know it’s going to have some level of metanarrative. You know it’s going to draw on postcolonial theory. For a lot of readers, that knowledge is enough to make the idea of reading the novel a yes or a no. For this reader, it was obviously a yes. Of course, what you don’t know before you read it, is how well Nina McConigley’s debut novel carries out what it guarantees in constructing a good book.
It’s 1986. Halley’s comet is blazing mostly unseen through the sky. Chernobyl is about to explode. And in the fictional oil town of Marley, Wyoming, Georgie Ayyar Creel and her sister Agatha Krishna are planning a murder. Dealing with fragmented identities has always been a problem for the girls, who were born in the US to an Indian mother with a love for British crime fiction (hence the girls’ names) and a white American father. But when their uncle Vinod (‘Vinny Uncle’) and his wife Devi move from Madras and into the Creels’ home, the girls are forced to contend with another fracture, this time caused by repeated sexual abuse by their mother’s beloved brother. Ultimately, they can think of only one way to be safe, inspired by the death of a neighbour’s cat after drinking antifreeze.
It’s an effective premise, and this is both the saving grace and disappointment of the novel. The segments dealing with the girls’ lives, going to the mall, to summer camp, becoming a cheerleader, completing teen magazine quizzes, and colluding to kill their abuser, are all finely wrought and compelling. The disappointment, is that instead of focusing on telling this story, in which the challenges of being brown second-generation immigrants in a majority-white US backwater naturally emerge, McConigley interleaves the story with chapters written in the second person, interpolating a reader who is assumptively white, male and psychologically whole thanks to the privilege of growing up in a situation where they got to compose the other without ever being othered themselves.
These chapters are in keeping with the title’s guarantees, but they don’t make the novel better. The voice becomes some kind of conflation of narrator and writer, neither twelve-year-old girl nor external writer, and the theoretical construct of the reader’s expectations feel clunky and unsophisticated, tainting a good story with undercooked critical theory. Any reader saying yes to a novel with this title is unlikely to need or enjoy these additions.