BOOK REVIEW ON SEQUEL TO PRECIOUS.....THE KID....

Fifteen years after the heralded publication of her first novel, “Push” — the basis for the 2009 film “Precious” — Sapphire has written a new novel, “The Kid,” which traces the life of Precious’ second child, Abdul. At its best, “The Kid” captures the grueling heartbreak of trying to love anything when the world doesn’t love you enough, of trying to summon desire or affection in the absence of any healthy context for either one.

As the book opens, Abdul is 9 years old. Precious has died of AIDS, and that loss — of maternal affection, of any shred of normalcy, of childhood itself — haunts Abdul as he is bounced from bad living situation to worse. His story is told in a complicated first-person, stream-of-­consciousness style, made trickier by the fact that the voice must shape-shift, taking on new moods and identities every time Abdul does.

“In my dreams I’m not black,” the young Abdul says, “and if I am I’m only half black and an Indian. I’m a warrior riding across the plains, in my dreams we drive the Europeans back into the ocean, in my dreams sometimes I am black, blacker than I am now, the blackest black man, Hannibal riding an elephant over the Alps, the ruler of a kingdom of a land where my father’s picture is like George Washington’s on the dollar bill, in my dreams I have not been beat. Or left alone. . . . When I close my eyes my dreams belong to the boogeyman, the Devil. They are the Devil’s lies. But my dreams were not lies before my mother died, or, except, maybe that time just before Mommy died was bad dreams.”

While Sapphire’s control of the narrative voice is impressive, the novel itself is occasionally less so, disconnecting from its human center and stranding its characters in the realm of the almost cartoonishly pathological. The brutality Sapphire depicts is deliberately, sometimes problematically, relentless: not even halfway through the novel, we’ve already encountered death, a vicious beating, multiple rape scenes and animal abuse. By the time a teenage Abdul strips down and masturbates to climax as his great-­grandmother narrates the story of her rape as a 10-year-old, many readers will be ready to say enough.

One wonders if the novel’s uncomfortably literal rendition of “tragedy porn” — through which someone derives selfish pleasure while witnessing or trying to ignore a narrative of suffering — is a calculated indictment of a certain type of reader. At times, it seems the mission of “The Kid” is to punish those readers of “Push” who found even the faintest glimmer of hope in Precious’ journey, as if Sapphire were daring anyone to make this novel into a Hollywood story with lovely celebrities playing well-intentioned social workers and tough but tender teachers who impart the redeeming value of the written word.

The teachers here turn out to be serial molesters. The overwhelmed social worker spends much of her page time apologizing for her own futility. When Abdul finally starts to come into his own as part of a company of dancers, most of them hold him at a distance. His rich and talented girlfriend, whom he initially pegs as the kind of “normal” person he envies, turns out to have a story as bleak and horrifying as his, and desires for him that are anything but redemptive.

Abdul himself recalls a modern Bigger Thomas, embodying all the loathed and feared stereotypes of contemporary black masculinity: the man trying to become immune to his own sense of empathy, the “down-low” black man, the gay-basher who picks up men in parks, the rapist, the ward of the state who has nothing to give back, the man who is “naturally” physically superior, the would-be murderer, the thwarted intellectual, the boy who wants to become his father but remains firmly in denial of his father’s brutality.

Structurally, “The Kid” reads a bit like “Invisible Man” dragged through a haunted house’s hall of mirrors — a novel in which a character who doesn’t know himself and is driven primarily by his own survival instinct goes from one terrifying absurdity to the next, without fully registering either the absurdity or his own role in it. In some such novels, the character emerges at the end having confronted himself and learned in the process, but Abdul’s evolving series of names and mistaken identities ultimately render him all but nameless. “I reach out my foam hand for things,” he says: “My name — just had it, but it passes me by. . . . Things are drifting past me again, how old I am, where I am, did I ever know?”

“The Kid” asks readers to consider what it means to inherit, and what it means to survive. Ultimately, Abdul does survive, in that he lives. But after the unimaginable cruelties inflicted both upon him and by him, we are left with the feeling that all his mistaken and performed identities are no longer in fact mistakes, but the only self he has.

Danielle Evans is the author of a story collection, “Before You Suffocate Your Own Fool Self.”



http://www.nytimes.com/2011/07/31/books/review/the-kid-by-sapphire-book-review.html?pagewanted=print