Book Review: The Narrows by Ann Petry
Goodreads Description: Link Williams is a handsome and brilliant Dartmouth graduate who tends bar for a lack of better opportunities for an African American man in a staid mid-century Connecticut town. The routine of Link’s life is interrupted when he intervenes to save a woman from a late-night attack. When they enter a bar together after the incident, “Camilo” discovers that her rescuer is African American and he that she is a wealthy, married, white woman who’s crossed the town’s racial divide to relieve her life’s tedium. Thus brought together by chance, Link and Camilo draw each other into furtive encounters against the rigid and uncompromising social codes of their town and times.
My Review: I really wanted to like this book. Over her life, Ann Petry worked as a social worker and a journalist, taught courses and wrote for the NAACP, and conducted sociological studies on the influence of segregation on children. This work gave her a very sociological perspective on the world and ultimately influenced the creation of The Narrows, which breaks down systematic racism to illustrate how many moving pieces intersect to justify the vilification and murder of black people. In Petry’s own words: “My aim is to show how simply and easily the environment can change the course of a person’s life.” When I step back and consider the book in whole, it’s so beautiful I could cry, because Petry demonstrates a nuanced understanding of how sociology and psychology shape oppression. However, the experience of reading this book is painful. Beyond that, when taking any of the book’s parts on their own, there’s almost nothing to like about them. It’s like throwing a bunch of garbage at a canvas, yet it somehow makes the Mona Lisa.
Petry wrote the book with a reflective perspective, using repetition and flashbacks to show how the past continuously interjects into the present and influences our behaviour. It doesn’t matter that Othello was written over 500 years ago, the story of a successful black man marrying a white woman to the displeasure of white men still influences the world around us, shaping perspectives and stereotypes. Petry also uses this reflective structure to demonstrate how childhood trauma shapes us long into adulthood. This reflective style is the crux of my problem with this book, because on the one hand, it is utterly brilliant. It artfully (and accurately) represents how the brain processes memory, how our social environment builds our identity from the ground up, and how we fall back onto sociological programming in times of stress. Yet on the other hand, this writing style is frustrating and boring to read. At times, the repetition becomes so overwhelming that it borders on obnoxious, which robs it of its power. Some scenes took forever to get through simply because the story had to continuously stop to repeat mantras or plot points that we've already seen a dozen times already. If not for this reflective perspective, the book could have easily been half or a third its size. While I think there's something meaningful to be found in this style, it certainly could have been cut down.
On top of the irritating writing style, every character is terrible. Not even in a “they have flaws” kind of way, but in a "they're a freaking monster" way that left little for me to relate to, attach to, or root for. Link, the main character, beats his love interest (though this is played off as romantic "lovers' quarrels," which... certainly says something about the author and the time period). Bill Hod, a quasi-father figure, beats Link as a child, Camilla betrays her love interest in a sickeningly anti-feminist way, and Abbie cares more about being an upstanding citizen of “the Race” than being a good mother. Even characters who don’t do anything overtly wrong are presented with a kind of sleaziness – from Mamie Powther who is presented as sexually devious, to Jubine the photographer who exposes injustices perpetuated by the rich, but is described as little more than a "greedy voyeur." While this is largely influenced by the POV character and often reveals more about the speaker than the subject (Abbie perceives Mamie as disgustingly sexual, for example), every character's perspective is coloured by this pessimism towards other people, and by the end of the book, all that negativity begins to weigh on the narrative. While the book attempts to present every character with duality, it leans too far into their flaws, leaving little good behind to appreciate. There’s lots of fascinating psychological angles to this story, but likeability is hard to come by.
As you can see, this book is a frustrating one for me. On the whole, I think it brilliantly explores how historical sociological scripts intersect with an individual's trauma and environment to shape oppression, but I can’t point to a single character or scene that I actually like. The reading experience is so dreadful that I can't in good faith recommend it to anyone, unless you're a literary scholar that's more interested in meaning than your own enjoyment. It's a real shame, too, because I do believe this book is something special, if only reading it wasn't such a drag.
TL;DR: 2/5 stars. A painfully dreadful read that culminates in an insightful deconstruction of systematic racism.
