Margaret Wappler
There’s little relief to be found in Roxane Gay’s riveting debut novel, An Untamed State. No air in the madly hot room Mireille Duval Jameson is forced to live in for thirteen harrowing days. No sense of self as her armed kidnappers erase every boundary she tries to preserve. No escape from the polarized economic realities of Port-au-Prince that resulted in her situation in the first place. Mireille, the US-born-and-raised daughter of a self-made Haitian construction magnate, was kidnapped in front of the family estate in Port-au-Prince to extract a $1 million ransom from her wealthy father. But Sebastian Duval, Critics are shaky cartographers, experimental scientists, evangelical missionaries and psychoanalysts of the artistic id. We forge a map of our tastes — roads in the cultural landscape and through our own dark aesthetic woods. We make leaps of faith, hypothesizing an artist’s meaning in a remarkably limited context. We swagger up to the craps table and play with the thrill of risk flushing our faces. Occasionally, we are blessed with a work that’s undeniably a classic; bless that rare visitation from the heavens above. Jealousy has a range of settings. At boil, it’s the green-eyed monster that destroys love affairs. At simmer, it’s a twinge in the gut when we’re confronted with something we covet. In third grade, it was the Cabbage Patch doll. In ninth grade, perfectly matched outfits from the Gap. In college, the Velvet Underground box set. In adulthood? A Craftsman in Silver Lake would be just fantastic, thank you. It doesn’t take a paranoid mind to fret over our state of hyper-marketing. Every Gatorade we buy at Vons, every Bed Bath & Beyond card we’ve registered for, every pop-up ad we’ve accidentally clicked on (only to be infested with spyware) is fed into some mass accounting of our habits, pleasures and vices.