THE UNICORN WOMANby Gail Jones
In the beginning of Gail Jones’ new novel, The Unicorn Girl, a tractor mechanic points a warning: “The ladies who make you a dreamer are by no means what you count on,” he says. “They’re all phantasm and confusion.”
He advises our wandering protagonist, a black ex-Military prepare dinner named Buddy Ray Man, who has returned to Kentucky after being stationed in Europe throughout World Warfare II. Sadly for Buddy, the steering comes too late. By this level, he’s already deeply infatuated with an enigmatic and elusive determine: the Unicorn Girl.
Buddy runs into her by likelihood at a spring carnival the place she is without doubt one of the aspect sights. However regardless of the eccentricities, what he finds is unusual. A lot to Buddy’s shock, the Unicorn Girl is black. “I used to be used to strolling into carnival tents solely to search out white freaks,” he reckons. She sits quiet and regal on a stool in the midst of the tent, sporting a sequined gown, and appears like a typical human girl in each manner aside from the “spiral horn protruding from her brow just like the horn of a bull or a goat. “
Buddy is immediately in love, but additionally not sure. who’s she is her horn actual His seek for solutions runs parallel to his journey again into American life.
However it is a Gail Jones ebook: there’s, in fact, rather more.
Along with being a plot driver, the unicorn girl is each an emblem and a foil. She is everyman, particularly everywoman and black American, who’s mocked as an alternative of revered, and she or he echoes all through the novel. Buddy, as a black veteran who served his nation and returned residence not as a hero however as a second-class citizen due to Jim Crow, is a feminine unicorn. Kate Riley, employed to restore tractors when the lads are despatched to battle however demoted to cleaners after they return, refuses to be a unicorn girl—she chooses to not work, then to work at the hours of darkness relatively than let others to see her disgrace. A number of different characters select, in their very own manner, majestic obscurity over ignoble prominence. It is a novel about visibility and respect and the choice to step again from the sunshine. “Invisibility is energy,” a traveler tells Buddy.
That is solely scratching the floor of this brief however dense novel. Nearly each element is loaded with a double which means. And like a lot of Jones’ work, The Unicorn Girl additionally performs with time, goals and reminiscence, which collide with narrative.
I discovered all of it complicated, wealthy, insightful – and disappointingly measured.
My disappointment stems partly from the excessive bar the writer has beforehand set. Jones actually is one of the most influential black writers of the 20th and 21st centuries. Her first ebook, Corregidora (1975), was acquired and edited by Toni Morrison for Random Home and landed with fanfare. “With this, Gail Jones proves that literature does certainly advance,” Raymond Sokolow raved in Book Review.
Over the subsequent 20 years, she constructed on that success with a handful of different notable books, together with Eve’s Husband and The Therapeutic (a 1998 Nationwide E-book Award finalist). Her work belongs to a paradigm shift that reframes approaches to race, gender, slavery, abuse, retribution, restoration, sexuality, and heritage.
Then in 1998 after a personal tragedy became a public spectacleshe disappeared. She eventually reappeared in 2021and even then her return was solely partial – she averted interviews and the press, however started to publish books once more, together with “Palmares” (Pulitzer finalist) and “Birdcatcher” (Nationwide E-book Award finalist). The Unicorn Girl is the newest on this comeback.
A part of the energy of Gail Jones’ novel is the way in which she weaves her characters collectively. They’re entangled in contentious relationships; they’re typically on the verge of or reacting to horrible violence; whether or not they prefer it or not, they rule their lives beneath the load of historical past. They’re caught previously and the current, and that creates the stakes and the catharsis. Studying her books looks like strolling by means of a minefield – we will see the destroyed land round us and simply wait to see which step will set off the subsequent explosion.
The Unicorn Girl takes a distinct method. It is an train in restraint. Buddy is a wanderer and observer, which makes him a helpful automobile for Jones’s remarkably insightful analytical eye, however his wandering additionally makes him really feel indifferent. Right here, Jones’ attribute spunk is changed by one thing heavier. This novel does not really feel as alive as her earlier books.
The Unicorn Girl is intelligent and impeccably constructed, however in comparison with the opposite titles in Jones’ catalog, it feels secondary, secondary. It looks like Jones has taken what we’d consider as a “Gale Jones novel” and intentionally turned it on its head. The result’s a form of countermelody – a piece that fantastically enhances the primary melodies of her work, however doesn’t absolutely fulfill by itself.
THE UNICORN WOMAN | By Gail Jones | Beacon Press | 176 pages | $26.95
