Book review : Bastard...

Dorothy Allison’s « Bastard out of Carolina » is a wonderful novel. It is set in a small town among Red Necks. For the most part, they are desperately poor, violent, irresponsible, alcoholic, naïve, racist, bullies, almost illiterate and constantly shouting at each other. Anney (nicknamed Bone), an intelligent, sensitive child is growing in that infernal circle. Her worst enemy is Daddy Glen, her stepfather. He touches her when she is only eight, then graduates to whipping her with his belt. When she turns fourteen, he beats her up and rapes her. Anney truly loves only one person in the world : Anna, her mother, but after the rape, Anna chooses to run away with Glen, effectively abandoning her daughter to her own fate. The book subtitle could have been : “How to destroy a child in ten easy lessons.”

Nevertheless, this tribe of losers is made up of human beings. Their souls ache all over, they stagger through life, from one mistake to the next. In Buddhism, it is said that 90% of all the suffering we endure is self-inflicted. We are our own instruments of torture : Ἑαυτὸν τιμωρούμενος, (Heauton Timorumenos) as the ancient Greek used to say. Dorothy Allison is fully conscious of it. She endows these social failures with a certain dimension of human dignity, to the point that the reader feels sorry for them, and even develops a measure of affection towards them. Monolithic characters do not move us. Unhappy, complex, guilty characters who are not “all bad” become part of us, and move us deeply. In that respect, as in many others, "Bastard of out Carolina" is indeed a masterpiece.  

The style is handled masterfully. The reader, is plunged into the Deep South as in a vat of tepid water. You can feel it on your skin and in your lungs. The dialogues are so true to life that as you read, it seems that you are listening to them. Dorothy Allison makes you see, hear, smell, touch, taste… and dream through this rough and complex world. The last sentence of each chapter lifts you up to a new, poetic level.

In an appendix, the author tells us that her book has been banned from a number of school libraries. She doesn’t specifically say why, but I think I can fill that gap. It’s called masturbation. From a very young age, Anney’s attraction to DIY orgasms becomes her main hobby. The same goes for Reese, her young sister. The school library ban comes from the fact that we live in a world where millions of nice, church going people like to pretend that they do not possess sexual organs. Some don’t even have a digestive system. They become aggressive and intolerant if a book mentions anything of the sort. They think that describing wars, fights, torture and psychotic behaviour (the average child watches something like 17 shootings, stabbings and fights every night on TV) is far more acceptable than admitting that girls – and boys, of course, and indeed adults – often play with themselves : a fine example of the way religions have warped the minds of a whole population, accepting daily confrontation to all the horrors that human beings can inflict on each other while condemning some utterly harmless behaviour.