For months Joan would replay this moment, trying to decipher the look on her husband’s face. Was it guilt? Confusion? Indignation? Stoicism? Acting? But nothing, not even a revolving camera of omniscience, a floating momentary opportunity to narrate, would allow anyone to truly understand the truth about George. He became a hard statue, an obstacle, a symbol.I don't think I quite get the hype about The Best Kind of People: sure, discussions on rape culture are timely, and whether we're talking about women feeling powerless to bring charges against a beloved celebrity or a fratboy sports team, it's good that we're talking about it; empowering victims and busting mythos. This book adds to the conversation, but as it focusses solely on the family members of a man – teacher, mentor, pillar of the community – who is charged with four counts of sexual misconduct with a minor and attempted rape, we never learn anything about the interiority of the accusers or the accused (what I think are the more interesting angles), it simply looks at the question, “What would you do if your husband or father was brought up on these charges? How unwavering would your support be as debatable evidence comes to your attention?” The wife and children cycle through various responses, none of them acting in ways that I could identify with, and as I found the writing to be merely servicable and the politics of the storyline to be aggressively progessive (the wife says at one point, “Studies do show that right-wing people have a lower IQ”; could be true, but this is the unrelenting tone of the book), this felt more polemic than novel. Not my favourite. It could well win some Canadian literary awards for this same reason.
I did like the pacing of this book: George is arrested in the first chapter, and as we never hear from either him or his accusers, I needed to keep reading to find out the specifics of what he was accused of, and whether or not he did it. (view spoiler) In a parallel storyline, the daughter's boyfriend's mother's boyfriend (phew) is a stalled novelist who secretly decides to write a fictionalised account of the case. The daughter mistakes his opportunism for romantic interest, and as she fantasises about starting a relationship with him, it made me uncomfortable, wondering if this would be morally wrong if it came to pass (she is seventeen, but she's also vulnerable and having Daddy issues, and he is giving her pot...) There were many reasons to keep reading, even as I wasn't particularly enjoying the experience.
As for the aggressively progressive: an anti-feminist support group comes out in aid of George (even though they don't know the particulars of the case any more than we the readers do), and they're repeatedly made to look like wingnuts:
Your father is a symbol of all that feminism has done to cause hysteria on this world. Hysteria has become law! Feminists show specific signs of mental illness, and you can see, this is what happens when these women get too much power. Innocent men go to jail because girls aren’t taught anything about being decent and responsible human beings. They are taught they can do anything, and deserve special treatment, and men have to pay for it.I have seen wingnuts talk just like that on comment threads, so I'm not saying it's not an appropriate viewpoint to parody, but there's nothing balancing it: if you don't automatically believe the accusers, you're a low IQ right-wing conspiracy theorist. And every intelligent character is a secret atheist, only attending church out of community obligation. Joan, George's wife, has an epiphany about charitable duties while attending church for the first time after George is arrested:
She now saw in these activities the glowing inauthenticity of the Church, reaching out to the disadvantaged for some ulterior motive, to do God's work. She understood that maybe the volunteers didn't even see the recipients' faces; they saw only points in God's good favour, and used their actions as proof that they were virtuous people despite their many repeated sins.I understand that author Zoe Whittall has won at least one award specifically for being an LGBT writer, so it's totally reasonable that she would have the son be a gay man, but she made a curious choice with this character: repeatedly, she goes over the fact that he had his first sexual relationship with the twenty-five year old coach at his high school, and that there was nothing wrong or exploitative about that; they were in love and the only gay partners they could find in their small, conservative town was each other. So, a student having a longterm sexual relationship with his coach at the high school was perfectly acceptable, but a science teacher who makes inappropriate contact with the girls he was supervising on a ski trip (and again, we're never given any details about what the contact involved, or if it even happened) should be locked up without bail for almost a year before trial? This parallel can't have happened by chance, so what was the point that Whittall was trying to make? (And I couldn't help but eyeroll at the fact that the brilliant Ivy League-bound daughter decides to enrol in Gender Studies when she attends Columbia the next fall; it's simply all of a piece with what comes before.)
As I said before, the writing was just so-so, and as an exploration of the responses of the family of an accused sex-offender, I really didn't think it accomplishes much: all three of them cycle between support and doubt and blow up their personal relationships in ways I couldn't understand. In an example of a clunky chapter, the daughter storms out of class when someone gives a presentaion on the nature of consent, and that very night, after blacking out at a party with her new friends, she knows she has been penetrated – is too sore to ride her bike home – but even with everything that's going on, she has no real introspection about the event or any notion that she should do anything about it; I found it all so frustrating. I don't get the appeal at all.
The 2016 Scotiabank Giller Prize Longlist:
Mona Awad : 13 Ways of Looking at a Fat Girl
Gary Barwin : Yiddish for Pirates
Andrew Battershill : Pillow
David Bergen : Stranger
Emma Donoghue : The Wonder
Catherine Leroux : The Party Wall
Kathy Page : The Two of Us
Susan Perly : Death Valley
Kerry Lee Powell : Willem De Kooning's Paintbrush
Steven Price : By Gaslight
Madeleine Thien : Do Not Say We Have Nothing
Zoe Whittall : The Best Kind of People
*Won by Madeleine Thien for Do Not Say We Have Nothing. Not really a surprise, but this is how I ranked the shortlist, entirely according to my own enjoyment level with the reading experience:
Gary Barwin : Yiddish for Pirates
Catherine Leroux : The Party Wall
Madeleine Thien : Do Not Say We Have Nothing
Mona Awad : 13 Ways of Looking at a Fat Girl
Emma Donoghue : The Wonder
Zoe Whittall : The Best Kind of People
