You Can't Say I Didn't Warn You...

Back in March, I passed along one of the first scouting reports on Alice Randall's second novel, Pushkin and the Queen of Spades. It sounded iffy then, and now that the critics have had a chance to inspect the merchandise closely, it sounds pretty awful.

Carlin Romano at the Philadelphia Inquirer goes back and revisits the negative reviews The Wind Done Gone received as a means of contextualizing the tension between Randall's self-positioning as an empowering force in African-American literature and the literary establishment's dismissal of her as a bad, bad writer. When he does tackle the protagonist/narrator's "memoir/plea to her wayward son to sway him from marrying a white girl," he tears into Randall hard, pointing out that for an alleged professor of Russian literature, the character makes dumb mistakes about Russian history, culture, and language--not that her command of English is any better.

Meanwhile, at NYTBR, Lizzie Skurnick (woo!) takes a similar approach. Even constrained by space limitations, Skurnick gets in some pretty good shots as she explains how "the novel veers drunkenly from the poetic to the analytical to the biographical." She also contextualizes the novel's publication by passing along Randall's defense of her writing style, where she brashly attempts to link an attempt at avant-gardism to a self-proclaimed Afro-advocacy: "To say I have to follow a traditional novelistic structure is like saying I have to straighten my hair."

Of course, it's not like saying any such thing--and more to the point, it seems to me that people are not so much asking her to write "traditional" fiction as they're saying she's not especially good at the experimental stuff. Ishmael Reed got high marks for Mumbo-Jumbo, after all, because it wasn't just mumbo-jumbo. Can the same be said of Pushkin and the Queen of Spades? Irene Warner at the San Francisco Chronicle is willing to give Randall credit for her wordplay, so maybe there's a case to be made. She also offers up this backhanded compliment: "Unfortunately, Randall does such a fine job of portraying Armstrong's fixation on her elite education and blind spot for compassion that it becomes harder and harder to care about her, never mind like her."