Reader’s Notebook, 10/10/23

I just started a book that is probably going to take me a few weeks to get through. Seems like a good moment to clear out the queue so I don’t forget about these two.

We Cast a Shadow – Maurice Carlos Ruffin
Writers have been using the “how far would you go to protect your child” trope for ages. Many of us can relate to it in a strongly emotional way, so it often works.

Here Maurice Carlos Ruffin takes that idea and places it in a near-future world where things are, to put it mildly, not good for Black folks in America. Things are so bad, in fact, that many Americans with dark skin are pouring their savings into treatments that will “de-melanize” them, a painful and sometime unsuccessful process that slowly lightens their skin to the point where they can pass as white.

Our narrator has effectively won the lottery. The law firm he works for has a periodic competition amongst its Black associates to earn a coveted promotion to shareholder status. It is a competition more about debasing yourself more than your opponents than proving you are the best lawyer or can generate the most billable hours. The losers? Their lives as attorneys are basically over, and are forced to find new employment. Mr. Narrator wins, though, and his victory brings not just security but enough money to begin his son’s de-melanization. The son is dubious about the process. His wife, who is white, is strongly against it.

Over the course of the book the narrator makes a series of progressively more frustrating decisions, all with the goal of paying for his son’s treatment and putting him on the path for a better life. As you might expect, things don’t go as the narrator plans.

This is a satirical novel that is often hilarious. It is also quite troubling. Those questions of how far you’ll go for your kids are always fraught. The hoops Ruffin puts his narrator through seem maddening. But as a white, male, American I don’t know that I could ever fully understand the choices he is forced to make.

Also unsettling is that the new America Ruffin builds doesn’t seem that ridiculous. He bases little pieces of that future world on things that are happening right now, such as the dishonest fights over school curriculums. It feels like his book is as much a warning about the path we are on as it is a speculative piece of fiction. It is also a reminder that we have all been programmed to look out for our own interests first and to be suspicious of the collective good, making it easier to divide us and restrict the rights of anyone who is a little different.

With A Mind to Kill – Anthony Horowitz
It took me several months to get to Horowitz’s final book in his James Bond trilogy, so I kind of forgot where things were left. Apparently Bond was brainwashed by the Soviets and sent back to London to kill M. That plot was thwarted and Bond was “re-programmed,” but it was announced that M had died in hopes the Soviets would attempt to sneak 007 back to Moscow, where he could undermine their efforts from the inside.

That’s pretty much what happened. There’s a woman involved, of course. The Russian baddies are all bad. Bond does good things in the end and saves the world.

I didn’t find this one as compelling or interesting as the first two in the series. But I’ll still take a gander at some of Horowitz’s non-Bond mysteries at some point.