The Good: Realism
The Bad: Realism, Characters, Writing style is lackluster.
The Basics: Stark realism detracts from any other aspects of Liliane: Resurrection Of The Daughter. Don't bother with this book - it's dull, uninspired and ultimately un-cathartic.
Occasionally, there comes a work that is, quite simply, too "on the nose" as directors say. That means they are too precise and they hit their topic so precisely that the work feels too put together. An easy example is when you're watching pretty much any television show and you're thinking "The banter there is real good! I wish I could have comebacks like that!" That is, usually in film, being "on the nose" is when dialogue is too witty, too clever, and works on so many other levels that it makes us think "People don't talk like this!" or "I wish I was like that!" It contains a level of idealism to how things could or should be rather than how they are.
The flip side is that sometimes, a work captures reality too closely; it captures events exactly as they are. The problem? Usually when we notice, it's an event that doesn't stand up to the scrutiny or that one does not want to have experience with. Liliane: Resurrection Of The Daughter is one such novel.
The simple explanation of what the novel is is that it is a novel about therapy sessions between the title character and her therapist. The bulk of the novel is in the therapy sessions exploring Liliane's character and traumas. Lilianne is a deeply traumatized girl whose inability to vocalize her feelings and her experiences leave her socially awkward and almost voiceless. As the layers of her psyche are peeled back and the abuses she suffered are revealed, she begins to understand herself.
It sounds fine or at least manageable. Where Liliane fails is in its stark realism. As the protagonist delves into her own psyche, the novel becomes labor intensive and droll. And herein we discover the realism: psychoanalysis is seldom interesting unless you're analyzing someone (or something) or experiencing the cathartic release of therapy. Reading anyone's therapy transcripts would rapidly become grating and boring. It's especially true the deeper the scarring. Despite the theory of "fascination with the abomination" from Heart of Darkness, the more intensely we explore "the abomination" in real terms the less fascinating they become. The deeper the scarring, the more work to reach the reality of the situation and the journey is not an easy one, not by any means. That means that often the patient is going to be ambivalent or reluctant or outright counter progressive to the process.
What we find in Liliane is just that. Shange gets serious points for the realism of creating an experience that reads as a psychoanalytic transcript. In that, it is boring, pedantic, and just plain long. The key to writing successful psychotherapeutic scenes or works is focusing on the result, not on the process. That is, it's fine to show the digging for the truth, it's good to have ambivalence and fear about what is being uncovered, but when it's done with pure realism it will always fail because the process is essentially uninteresting and a lot of work. And the vast majority of the time, the subject comes across as whiny and difficult.
That's precisely what happens here. The realism of psychoanalysis is too closely captured and the novel becomes boring, the protagonist largely unlikeable and the plot almost nonexistent. Even as a work of cultural outsiders this work doesn't measure up - the nature of the angst of the outsider comes across better in other works (i.e. Zami by Audre Lorde or Invisible Man by Ralph Ellison, both of which also don't continually flaunt that the protagonists are outsiders explicitly).
Don't waste your time on this novel - go to therapy yourself and actually accomplish something. Reading this novel will make painfully clear why Freudian psychoanalysis is most often done, and most effectively, on literary works.
For other multicultural novels, please check out my reviews of Juneteenth by Ralph Ellison.
3/10
For other book reviews, please check out my index page!
© 2010, 2001 W.L. Swarts. May not be reprinted without permission.
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