An Untamed State by Roxane Gay - 2014 - 368 Pages

 

An Untamed State by Roxane Gay - 2014 - 368 pages

An Untamed State, the debut novel of Roxane Gay, centers on the kidnapping of a young Haitian woman from one of wealthiest families in the country.  Once you start reading An Untamed State you may find it hard to stop.  

Mirelle is visiting her super rich parents with her husband, from Nebraska.  They live in Miami where she is an immigration attorney and he very successful in construction.  Gay powerfully contrasts the life of her family to the common people of Port-au-Prince.  Her kidnappers demand a million dollars for her release. Her father refuses to pay, saying he will not deal with kidnappers as it is playing into corruption.  The kidnappers begin to torture her with multiple gang rapes, cigarette burns, knife cuts, starvation and confinement in a cage. The lead 

kidnappers says this is caused by the huge income disparities supported by men like her father. Thirteen miserable days go by before the ransom is paid and she is released.

Upon return home she is horribly stressed, diagnosed with a form of post traumatic stress which renders her husband’s embrace horrifying.  We follow her through months of the impact of being tortured.  

As the story unfolds we learn of her once very loving relationship to her husband, a blue eyed blond.  She can never bring herself to forgive her father for taking so long to pay the ransom.

The closing is very powerful.   

Prospective readers should know this is a very explicit work with numerous scenes of sexual abuse.  I found this a very powerful work but I would not give it to my young adult daughters to read.

Roxane Gay’s writing appears in Best American Mystery Stories 2014, Best American Short Stories 2012, Best Sex Writing 2012, A Public Space, McSweeney’s, Tin House, Oxford American, American Short Fiction, Virginia Quarterly Review, and many others. She is a contributing opinion writer for the New York Times. She is the author of the books Ayiti, An Untamed State, the New York Times bestselling Bad Feminist, the nationally bestselling Difficult Women and the New York Times bestselling Hunger. She is also the author of World of Wakanda for Marvel. She has several books forthcoming and is also at work on television and film projects. She also has a newsletter, The Audacity.  From Roxanegay.com

I also read this month two of her short stories from Difficult Women.

Graceful Burdens - A Short Story by Roxane Gay - 2020

Graceful Burdens - A Short Story by Roxane Gay - 2020

This story is include in the Kindle Unlimited Program or can be purchased for $1.95.

This is the third short story by Roxane Gay I have had the pleasure of reading.

In this story women are tested  at age 16 to see if they are genetically suited to bear children.  Only those who past the test are allowed to have children.  In this world women still have an urge to have children.  That is why public libraries have babies, up to three years old, that women can check out for two weeks.  It is never made clear where the babies come from.   After age three the babies are either sent to the Center for Disease Control or, for a purpose you are better off not knowing, turned over to the government.


In a way women  declared unfit to give birth have more freedom that the elected.  They are free  to have sex with men declared unfit fathers.  No one really cares what they do.

We follow Hadley during her two weeks with a baby.  We learn of her frustrations.  Her temporary borrowed life launches her on a journey of self-discovery.

Graceful Burdens is a lot of fun and made me think.

The Mark of Caine - A Short Story by Roxane Gay - 2017 . From her debut collection - Difficult Women

The Mark of Caine - A Short Story by Roxane Gay - 2017 . From her debut collection -  Difficult Women

You may read today’s story here.

Roxane Gay is one of the most celebrated of contemporary writers, for her essays as well as her fiction.  This is my second venture into her work.  I hope to read all of her work, Essays, Novels, Short Stories and her memoir Hunger.


I first read the lead story   in Difficult Women, “I Will Follow You” in June of this year.

“I Will Follow You” is about two sisters and their very close relationship.  The story begins with a scene with the older sister, her boyfriend and the younger of the two sisters.  We learn a bit about the men currently in their lives.  About twenty five percent into the story we learn about something horrible that was done to them as pre-adolescents that shapes their remaining days.

This is a story of a woman married to an evil man and having an affair with his twin brother, a decent man.  This sets the  stage

“My husband is not a kind man and with him, I am not a good person.
Sometimes I wake up in the middle of the night and he, Caleb, is kneeling over me, his fingers tracing my neck. I place my hands over his, the rough skin, the swollen knuckles. I squeeze.
I wear heavy eyeliner and dark lipstick because my husband once said that he always wants me to look the way I did the night we met in a bar, drunk and numb, looking for trouble before it found us. He can't stand to see me any other way, he said. He wasn't being nostalgic.”

Clearly not exactly a relationship that brings out the best in either partner.

“My husband has an identical twin, Jacob. Sometimes they switch places for days at a time. They think I don't know. I am the kind of woman who doesn't mind indulging the deception.”

There really are two Brothers, not two sides to one man.  They run an architectural firm.  Jacob has a girl friend.  Sometimes they switch places and women can tell only by their behaviour.

I don’t want to convey more of the plot of this acute story.  The ending is fascinating.