The Power by Naomi Alderman

[lightreads]

The Power by Naomi Alderman

3/5. Teenaged girls develop the power to electrocute with a touch. They can awaken the power in older women. And the world changes.

Some bullet point thoughts, because I had a lot of them, but they don't all go together:

• I can see why this made a lot of award shortlists and longlists. And also why it doesn't seem to have been anyone's ride-or-die best book. It's a great conversation piece, is what it is. But it's also nihilist as hell, as the central conceit of the book is that women, given a physical power over men, would recreate the patriarchy in their image, practically point-by-point (e.g., male genital mutilation is a thing). Which is not a statement about women, but a statement about humanity.



• I was surprised to discover how strongly I disagreed with this conceit. I confusedly thought about this and discovered that yes, I do actually have some latent notions that women – more individually than collectively – would behave differently with irrefutable power than men do. But also, this book is largely about women's trauma – from childhood rape, from a lifetime of being disregarded for brothers, from a career of smiling in the face of men's bullshit. And I think that a sort of women's mass societal trauma response, when given the option, would have to look different than the patriarchy. It's just coming from a different place. Doesn't mean it would be a utopia. But making it a pointed tit-for-tat rundown of inverted oppression – men are too emotional, men can't be trusted with important decisions, the stern and respected female TV journalist should be paired with a pretty young male partner whose job it is to be fatuously dumb, etc. etc. ad nauseum is not particularly convincing. Or interesting.



• I discovered after finishing this that Margaret Atwood is one of Alderman's partisans and mentors. And . . . yep. Per this book, yep she sure is.



• The framing device of this book – and one of the most interesting parts of it – is that it is written by a male author far into the future of this new world. It's both interesting and unsuccessful – there are the expected inversions as his female academic colleague patronizes and misunderstands his work – but it also doesn't really fulfill its promise. It could be doing something really clever with historicity and context – the thousands of years of gendered oppression baked into the fictional author's thinking, the thousands of years of gendered oppression baked into the response of all the women within the contemporary narrative. But it doesn't work that way, and fixing it would literally require rewriting every word of the central narrative to account for this supposed future man's internalized misandry.



• It's amazing how much this book does not care about reproduction. Like . . . at all. Which is super weird for abook about gendered oppression. So weird that it has to be deliberate. But hell if I can figure out what she was trying to do with that. Because as it is, it's a gaping hole. Because the patriarchy isn't built purely on physical strength. It just isn't.