Heartburn, Bouncing Roller Coasters...Oh, This Sounds Fun

David Mehegan of the Boston Globe takes an in-depth look at Alice Randall, showing some sympathy for the author whose latest novel, Pushkin & the Queen of Spades was panned hard early on. Later reviewers have been noticeably kinder; Barbara Lloyd McMichael of the Seattle Times calls it "intentionally provocative stuff, designed to open your eyes and make your heart burn," while Yvette Blackman of the Associated Press compares reading the novel to "riding the Cyclone at Coney Island, bouncing high along a track you're not totally comfortable with because it shakes you up."

The interview revisits the whole The Wind Done Gone controversy as a buildup to the real-life tangle of emotional and racial issues informing the new novel, in which "the first sentence of the book--'Look what they done to my boy!'--paraphrases the grieved comment of Mamie Till Bradley in 1955, at the funeral of her lynched teenager Emmett Till: 'Let them see what they have done to my boy.'" Now, having admittedly not read the book, I couldn't say for sure, but based on my limited knowledge of its plot, comparing a successful college football player who's about to happily marry a Russian woman to Emmett Till seems a bit tactless, if not tasteless. Randall's subsequent descent into handwaving psychocliché isn't much more appealing:

"As much as I love blackness and cultural blackness, I really felt the tug of Tanya's love for Pushkin. My ex-husband, after our divorce, married someone who is white. What does that tell my daughter, particularly when 50 percent of black, college-educated women are not getting married today who want to get married? I worry about that, but ultimately we must treat everyone's erotic-romantic choices as their own. I have to move to accept love where it is seen." Writing the book taught her "to allow my child to make her own choices, and to allow black men to make their own choices."

First I've ever heard of that "50 percent" statistic...if you know where she got it from, be sure to mention it in the comments section, eh? You might also explain to me what all these alleged spinsters have to do with her ex-husband, but I don't want to ask for too much.