lightreads (![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
lightreads) wrote2018-04-14 10:02 pm
lightreads) wrote2018-04-14 10:02 pm
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The Power by Naomi Alderman
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:
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.
no subject
But I like what you've pointed out: even if women were AS abusive as men, it would be in different ways. For one thing, a woman can't be cuckolded. So matriarchs, while they might try to control men's sexuality, wouldn't be doing it to ensure their biological children inherit their wealth, the way a patriarch would.
no subject
Yeah, it's not that I thought oh, but women won't be violent. More that it seemed weird that they would be violent in exactly these familiar well-worn ways. Also, it's notable that not a single POV in this book ever brushes up against the idea of making a new better world. Not really. Not ever meaningfully. And they wouldn't, since Alderman had to get most of her main characters to that nihilist place at the end. But it's still a remarkable omission.
no subject
ETA: I guess what appalls me is the underlying assumption that a new, better world is not an option. That the best one can hope for, in this world or any other, is to be on top.
no subject
Yeah. Though I do think there is an argument to be made that we're both reading this from the wrong angle by poking holes in the worldbuilding. The idea that this future in which the book is written is basically like our world, but with gender roles flipped, is so obviously absurd that it takes itself out of the realm of fiction and into, IDK, Swiftian allegory? Something else. Don't get me wrong, I don't think it's successful as allegory either, and reading it that way actually makes it much more nihilist and much grimmer about the inherent violence in humanity. But it takes a lot of my criticisms off the table.
no subject
Darnit, now I want to read the book with the actual non-Swiftian world building, about what would happen if women suddenly evolved superior physical strength. *sigh* Maybe I'll just go read Houston, Houston again.
Daughter verse
When I first heard the premise of The Power, I thought maculategiraffe got this published, but this review sounds like her story, which is mainly interested in hurt/comfort, still has better world building in the background.
no subject
Have you read Tiptree's Houston, Houston, Do You Read? I mean, Tiptree was writing quite a while back, of course, but her version of this -- well, it's a little different in conceit, but anyway the world of women where the men have all died off and they're confronted by men from before that time, is very different than our world and that's what's so interesting about it.
Huh. I am surprised there are no thoughts about reproduction. Interesting.
no subject
Yes, I've read the Tiptree. Totally different world, and of course the point of that one is the POV and what it was supposed to have been doing to Tiptree's contemporary readers. Whereas this book seems more like a bit of sociological stunt writing? IDK.
no subject