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Quiet Deseperation

I have been reading Want and finding it particularly easy to stick with. Do I love it? perhaps not. Is it a memorable experience? maybe not. Yet, there is a raw quality to that quiet, stifled desperation in the narrator's voice that draws me in. There is this one line that jumped out at me for instance:

Mommy, says the four-year-old, on our walk home, if you don’t go to work, will we still live?

It has been my experience that, four year-olds can sense misery, despair and desperation. They may not have the words to play back to us everything they know and understand about what is going on in our lives. But that question says it all - it is like a mirror reflecting the narrator back to herself. Only it is gut-wrenching in the voice of a four year-old. The fact that the author is able to do this despite creating such a cultural cliché of a protagonist, is an astonishing feat

Want’s narrator is white, a creative, Brooklyn-based: the three horsemen of our decade’s literary apocalypse, in which an obnoxious percentage of literary fiction dotes on characters you couldn’t tell apart in a Carroll Gardens precinct line-up.



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