i am the office of historical corrections (to reviews about danielle evans' work)
my one-man effort to get people to appreciate one of our greatest short story writers
in general, i tend to find praise less interesting than criticism. for one, it is hard to write about a very intelligent work with as much (or more) intelligence as the work itself displays. and, if i really love a piece of art, i don’t know how to really express what i love about it without feeling not only that the work would speak better for itself—that it is good precisely because of how it explains itself to me (and a general prospective audience) to understand it, that part of the greatness of an aesthetic experiences will always be ineffable, for the better. as the writer garth greenwell puts it:
This is something mysterious to me, the way that great art refrains from dictating our response, the way it respects our freedom—presenting us with something too complex to coerce an uncomplicated response.
moreover, given the deteriorating state of culture journalism in this country, made even worse for books reporting (the rise of the most anticipated listicle over the review1, for example, and the turn towards freelance writers over dedicated, salaried staff), i’m not surprised that many of the reviews that i do find feel plain and inoffensive. there are some exceptions, of course: i would read anything by brandon taylor, andrea long chu, constance grady, kathy chow, angelica jade bastién, emily st. james, lauren michele jackson, e. alex jung, and jane hu (among many others). and, of course, good writing is hard. writing a good review of a work, good or bad, is hard. as hari kunzru says, “Yes, 90% of current fiction is crap. 90% of *everything* is crap. It always was.”
with that in mind, i’m going to try to improve the discourse around one of my favorite books, by one of my most beloved authors.
THE OFFICE OF HISTORICAL CORRECTIONS was published in november 2020. it is danielle evans’ second book, after her (fucking incredible) debut, BEFORE YOU SUFFOCATE YOUR OWN FOOL SELF. it is not a novel, but a short story collection consisting of six devastating stories and the titular novella, which i am convinced (without checking) has been optioned for film/tv.
per the cover copy:
In The Office of Historical Corrections, [Danielle Evans] brings her blisteringly smart voice and X-ray insights to the subjects of race and U.S. history. … Moving between humor and grief, Evans portrays characters who are experiencing the universal confusions of lust and love, and getting walloped by sorrow—all while exploring how history haunts us, personally and collectively. Ultimately, she provokes us to think about the truths of U.S. history—about who gets to tell them, and the cost of setting the record straight.
i think this copy does a decent job of describing a book that i love very much (obviously more to come on this subject), which has performed well: i obviously don’t have sale numbers, but THE OFFICE OF HISTORICAL CORRECTIONS won the 2021 joyce carol oates prize (and was long-listed for a bunch of other notable ones) and has an average rating of 4.2 stars from 28k+ reviews on goodreads (a rare win for this awful website).
but while overall reception has indeed been positive, a frustrating pattern emerges in the media coverage of this book: of describing the book solely through its lessons on the black female experience. i was recently describing how this book examines justice and politics, and as i was thinking about it, i was struck with this strong, partly inexpressible emotion: just, like, i love this book. so i went to read book coverage, hoping i’d find someone who felt similarly or at least could explain how the fuck danielle evans was such a good writer. but scrolling through incredibly positive reviews, i was dismayed to feel… absolutely nothing for a book i love so much. no excitement, no passion, no electric sign of recognition.
a particularly egregious example: this review for the chicago review of books2, which bookmarks categorizes as a “rave.” it’s titled “‘The Office Of Historical Corrections’ is a Necessary Critique of the Current Moment”—which, ugh. i know writers often do not control their headlines, but it’s so indicative of the tone of this review.
take the end of the first paragraph: “Women carry this collection, and the characters of these stories are burdened by the death of loved ones, emotional personal decisions, and the weight of their families in crisis, but the persistent interrogation throughout the collection is America’s unending racism.”
or the end of the second paragraph: “The characters endure racial conflicts, whether it’s harassment while picking up prescriptions at the pharmacy or Lyssa never having the opportunity to play the part of a princess at the Titanic because of ‘something about historical accuracy, meaning no black princesses.’ Thematically, this conflict reappears throughout the collection. The Black characters end up punished for the color of their skin.”
in fact, it would be more productive to isolate the mentions of craft:
the opening sentence: “Danielle Evans’s second story collection, The Office Of Historical Corrections, draws on the current zeitgeist with provocative narratives examining race, female friendship, and privilege.”
“The stories are tightly structured, compact and efficient, driven by wry wit and Evans’s keen observations.”
“The stories are strengthened by the use of sarcasm and droll observation.”
“The success of the collection stems from balancing the gloom of racism with Evans wry commentary. The snarky narrative voice cuts deeply. These stories are now even more necessary.”
the first says nothing about evans’ skill as a writer, only how topical her subject matter appears to be; the third damns her with faint praise; and the last one i fucking hate. so we’ve got… a single sentence, from the entire review, that actually describes the literary qualities of the book. i’ve read the book; i don’t recognize it in this review.
i’ve singled out this piece because it’s especially bad, but it’s emblematic of most of the reviews i encountered: a infuriating didacticism that reduces the book to an antiracist treatise on black trauma. an educational experience. a “necessary” story.
let me describe some of the stories in this book3, though, as i mentioned, i do not think i can really convince you of the depth of feeling danielle evans can evoke with her writing simply by describing it—it is best understood by engaging with the art itself (which is my way of begging you to read her writing).
alright. one of my favorite short stories of all time, “boys go to jupiter,” is maybe the only successful discourse/culture war story i’ve seen yet: it’s a story about youth, about power, about grief and identity and agency; it’s a story told from the perspective of a white woman who chooses to put on a confederate bikini in a viral photo; it’s a story told from the perspective of a white woman who loses her mother at a young age; it’s a story told from the perspective of a white woman whose grief kills her best friend’s brother; it’s a story told from the perspective of a white woman who lets white supremacy erase her mistakes, who is complicit in the violence done to the black people in her life, becoming more and more so an active participant in this system. it is a story about accountability. it is, of course, about race and gender. it is about friendship and childhood and love. it is a story about speech, about action, about silence and storytelling and authorship. it is a story about culture, and society, and politics. it is a story about how we are our own choices as much as we are what happens to us. it is about how we are both how we see ourselves and the people the world makes us out to be.
even as i’m typing this out, i’m cringing because i sound like that reviewer, like this story comes down to a cute social media soundbite that a white person might retweet to seem like they’re in on an antiracism trend. let me try again: this story is so fucking devastating, lmao. claire’s grief for her mother is so palpable, so real, as is the story’s grief for angela and her family. the friendship between claire and angela is so fucking real, made even more painful when race comes between them, when it clarifies their positions in the world, when claire lets it happen.
take these lines:
When they kitten-pile into the grass, Claire turns to Angela. It is a love that requires touch, and so Claire snuggles against her, nuzzles into her neck to say it out loud against her. Love love love. Angela is her best friend, her other self. Someday they will go to college together. The world will unravel for them, fall at their feet.
At the funeral, Angela holds her hand and Aaron puts an arm around her shoulders. He is a perfect gentleman, but one with a mother, and Angela is a friend with a mother, and already they are galaxies away from Claire, alone in her grief.
like, fuck. what moves me so much about this story is how empathetic the story is toward claire, even as it does not soften how monstrous her actions have been; in other words, what moves me so much about this story is how clear-eyed the story is of claire’s monstrous actions, even as it understands her deeply, in her grief, in her pain, in her complications. what i love about this story is how deftly it steps away from your (or at least my) expectations of what this story is. how, every time you think there’s only one answer, evans pulls the story toward an unexpected revelation into the characters and the world. even how you read the story informs your relationship to the themes. in particular, a white reader apt to empathize with claire will likely ignore the general omission of black voices in the story, a formal choice that mirrors the myopia of claire’s own whiteness—then radically reproduced in the intentional silence of the blank cards the black students reveal when they leave the town hall. but then again: claire’s life is devastating; it’s just that the pain is causing her to do the wrong thing, over and over again.
speaking of brilliant moves, the ending of the story is a fucking miracle:
Claire has come prepared for an argument. She does not know how to resist this enveloping silence. It is strategic. It hums in her head. But the room is still half full. The microphone is still on. There are three reporters from the student paper, and ten from national news outlets. There are still ten feet between her and the echoing sound of her own voice, telling her she can still be anybody she wants to.
of course, the story leaves it unresolved, what claire is going to do—and it doesn’t matter. because this story is more than just this binary between “canceled” and not, between the choices we make and the world that acts upon us, between absolute powerlessness and absolute agency. the students have left, “but the room is still half full,” and claire, who has spent so much of her life being acted upon, “can still be anybody she wants to.”
now, i’m going to go back to the previous review, where the takeaway from this story is:
Although Claire does face a college disciplinary hearing and even is forced to confront her fellow students in a town hall event, unlike so many of the other black women in this story collection, Claire never really faces any meaningful comeuppance. Aaron is dead. Angela lost her brother. Carmen lives in fear. But Claire? Her white privilege endures, and in the end ‘she can still be anybody she wants to.’ There are no consequences for her, although the Black people her life intersects with all pay a heavy price.
back to THE OFFICE OF HISTORICAL CORRECTIONS, the work in question; there’s a line from the titular novella that i think about all the time, where the narrator (cassie) is talking about her white ex-lover (nick):
It was in some ways the thing I’d liked least about him, even less than things that were actually his fault: when I went places with him, things were easier; when I was with him, the do they know I’m human yet question that hummed in me every time I met a new white person quieted a little, not because I could be sure of the answer but because I could be sure in his presence they’d at least pretend.
on one hand, yes, this is a classic Discourse line—one intended to summarize the nonwhite experience in a pithy line, a pull quote that i could imagine being posted on an antiracist graphic. but on the other hand—oh, how it shocks me into a realization about power, about life, about the tense boundary between the individual and the collective. how it expresses the arbitrary cruelties of tacitly being othered, how the narrator is at once finally incorporated into a system and yet apart from it.
the first-person pov deliberately aligns us with the otherwise othered cassie, makes it impossible to think of her as anything but human (as, like, we should). and the value judgment of how “when I went places with him, things were easier”—a statement that places some agency on cassie, but, of course, she has such little power in these situations, her safety conditional, and nick is at once powerful and not “actually at fault”; that is, in fact, the problem. this sentence really gets at how personal culpability can become complicated by ostensibly innocent privileges, and the fucking injustice of how personal relationships between individuals can be shaped heavily by systems that the people in question are ostensibly not at fault for, that they cannot necessarily control; it beautifully expresses the uneasiness of powerlessness, the complications of agency. there is no easy empowerment here, no obvious answers to the questions posed, no right action for the narrator to take.
and how does that review summarize this novella?
Here the novella becomes something of a who-done-it mystery, and as the women investigate, they are once more forced to deal with common racism endured by Black Americans. Underpinning the story is their friendship. It began because they were both the only Black people in an all white social circle, but somehow their lives are yoked together anyway. Cassie explains her discomfort around Genevieve because she ‘felt revealed by the only nearby witness to my life as a whole.’ The uneasiness they feel stems from their forced friendship dictated by their otherness rather than by their sameness. They are only old friends because of the racism of other people.
what a fucking waste. there is so much here that’s not only about “the racism of other people,” but about how people can become themselves specifically through their relationships to people supposedly like them, how their attempts to distinguish themselves (to draw boundaries, to separate themselves) against this imposed similarity draws them closer still—a fucking fascinating insight literally quoted right there about how other people can “reveal” us to ourselves, if only someone would bother to close-read it.
to state the obvious: the accomplishments of THE OFFICE OF HISTORICAL CORRECTIONS are not only its insights into racism, though they are certainly central to the work; its accomplishments are its revelations about the human experience. it achieves what garth greenwell (making a brave reappearance) describes of great art:
To be sure, there are situations whose moral valence is clear: there are crimes, and there should be punishments. But if that’s all you want to know about a situation—that there’s a villain and they should be punished—then I don’t think we need art to think about it. … This doesn’t mean permanently suspending judgment, or suggesting that “nobody is at fault”; it means seeing that no one is reducible to fault.
failing to recognize this universality only feeds into this tired and shitty phenomenon in which works by white, male, cis, straight (add as many modifiers as you want) authors become expressions of the universal human spirit and are generally described as being about “betrayal,” or “family,” or “knowledge”—and pointedly not about “the white male experience.” again, not a new insight, but: the closer someone is to the identity of someone in power, the more “human” their work becomes; the farther it is, the more claim to universality it appears to give up. to which i can only say, no more!! how hard could it be, to acknowledge that the book is not only deeply interested in the subjectivity of black women, but also a literary achievement that speaks beautifully to the complexity of the universal human experience?
of course, a natural counterargument is to say: what’s wrong with being validated on the basis of one’s identity? to know you’re for a particular kind of reader and to be proud of not being for everyone? and, of course, a lot of art ends up rejecting its own community in a misguided play at universality. but this work is not failing on those grounds; it is indeed leaning into its specificity, into authenticity, into the lived experiences of black women. it is writing what it knows—in doing so, writing what we all know.
when i use the term “universal human experience,” i am trying to reach past a bland, inoffensive, counterblind colorblindness whose ambitions stop at “black people are human too,” toward a more complicated humanism that is invested in the inherent ambiguity of a multivalent human experience. not a facile “we,” but a complicated “we” that remains committed specifically to ambivalence and contradiction, that forgoes a neat moral siloing for the recognition that nothing is just one thing. in fact, THE OFFICE OF HISTORICAL CORRECTIONS—and much of evans’ writing—is universal because it understands how black women’s experiences are not seen as universal, are not centered, are relegated to the background. and in each of these stories, in foregrounding her characters’ experiences and examining their relationships to history, to power, and to storytelling, evans is saying something meaningful about authorship and whose stories matter; she is making an argument about the center that claims the center.
THE OFFICE OF HISTORICAL CORRECTIONS rejects the morally binaristic view of the world that stops at specious complexity, that i tend to find in a lot of other overtly “political” literature (especially the “social justice fanfic” described by writer kathy chow). it’s precisely this uneasiness that i find most vital in politics too. in the end, an easy dichotomy is counterproductive in its respectability politics. if racism creates perfect victims and monsters of us all, then those that don’t (or can’t) fit into that paradigm become problematized case studies—as opposed to exceptions that prove the rule. in the world, for each convenient example there is someone who is maybe 20% more culpable in what happens to them. does that mean they do not deserve protection? that they are no longer deserving of empathy, of reparations, of restitution?
in the end, people are complicated. and how do you mean to protect complicated people without recognizing their complexity? it fuels misguided investments in oversimplified solutions that hurt the people who actually need them the most. for a simple example, take the vitriol directed toward amber heard: someone who was not a perfect victim, who has many privileges, and who nonetheless suffered misogynistic abuse and deserves to tell her story. and the widespread and incredibly fucked up theory that she, actually, is the abuser is predicated precisely upon the oversimplistic binaries that evans refuses to indulge.4
as constance grady writes in her coverage of the trial:
In the end, perhaps that’s what’s most damning about the larger conversation around this trial: the inability to handle the ambiguities. Faced with a portrait of a relationship in which there’s compelling evidence of violence and toxic behavior on both sides, our culture seems unable to accept that we may simply be looking at a story without heroes. Instead, we demand a tidy narrative with a heroic redemption arc — and if the hero is a beloved, charismatic, and powerful white man, well, all the better.
most of all, like, this worldview just doesn’t feel honest to me anymore. (this is slowly becoming an expression of my personal baggage, lmao.) of course, i have to cop to my own epistemological limitations—maybe i only see evans’ work as universal because i, too, am a person of color who will never be able to understand the world otherwise. maybe i am so insistent that people care because i often feel like people do not care about me. and maybe i’ll grow out of this moral ambivalence one day, when i outgrow my internalized oppression and become a Happy, Normal Person. but, for now, i think that it’s not what i’m looking for in art, and it’s not what i’m looking for in life. it can be difficult to understand that great monsters say as much about human nature as what we might (want to) see ourselves as: as victims of circumstance, as blameless participants. but i know, at least, that i’m not a perfect victim.
by resigning yourself to the understanding that that person’s experience is Other to me, you stop trying to understand the world; in doing so, you stop trying to understand yourself. racism is not a specific experience of the world that can be truly understood only by a subset of people; racism expresses something meaningful about the human experience. racism is not interesting insofar as it expresses a narrow slice of humanity; it is interesting specifically because of what it says about human nature in general.
to say that literature about race speaks only to the experience of being nonwhite is to say that the experience of nonwhite people is so fundamentally different than those of white people that it is something someone would need to be educated on (and maybe even then not understand), and i guess i just don’t believe that that’s true. everyone understands power; everyone understands what it means to be an individual in the world. of course, race remains its own sociopolitical construct with unique complications and contradictions, and, of course, there are times that it is more helpful to focus on racism as an impersonal phenomenon—to formulate a structural critique that doesn’t overemphasize individual guilt/culpability and instead posits paths towards structural change. but when i read THE OFFICE OF HISTORICAL CORRECTIONS, i do not think, oh, this is something that reflects my experience of being nonwhite in america; i think, oh, this is something that reflects my experience of being alive. to separate this subject from literature, from the general concerns of all humanity, does it a great disservice: it relegates marginalized people’s experiences to the margins, once again.
in this sense, the coverage of danielle evans’ work becomes a neat microcosm of her most interesting themes. evans’ writing stands in implicit opposition to simple summaries of racism; it deliberately challenges its readers by withholding easy judgments, about refusing to reduce her characters to their marginalizations and their pain. her work is not here to “humanize” people in the trite (and often failed) tradition of art that deliberately tries to “improve society” or make a moral/political point—it is more meaningfully empathetic and constructive, and has irreducibly changed me as a reader, writer, and person. and yet her stories have failed for a substantial portion of her readership, because, even in praise, their writing belies a critical misunderstanding of these very ideas, infused instead with the unsuccessful didacticism and performative accountability of a post-summer 2020 mindset that fails to really see past the self, that reduces the humanity of her characters to antiracist lessons—not insights into their own lives.
there are some exceptions to this shitty coverage: jackie thomas kennedy for the star tribune delves into evans’ themes of “nostalgia, memory, and history” and “the power of appearance — not only the visibility of race, but also glittery notions of femininity, the princess-themed birthdays and ‘hot-pink’ bachelorette party games.” and jane hu, for the new york times book review, praises evans’ skill as a writer: “Evans’s propulsive narratives read as though they’re getting away with something, building what feel like novelistic plots onto the short story’s modest real estate.”
the best one is by katy waldman, for the new yorker, which manages to highlight the book’s interest in identity politics without reducing the stories to just that:
To read [Evans] is to become aware of ambience, of the peculiar iridescence that short fiction can sometimes offer: the stories are infused with many things, but not precisely “about” any of them.
i’m not going to lie: more and more so these days, i prefer the experience of going into a book without knowing anything about it. yes, i admit, this mindset bears a regrettable similarity to hyperliteral plot-obsessed spoiler culture, to which i simply must concede how you’re primed for an artistic experience will inevitably shape your understanding of the work in question, for better and for worse. sadly for authors around the world, this is of no fault of the work itself. but, like, i think i would not have had such an enjoyable experience had i gone into the stories expecting edification and empowerment (then again, it probably would’ve won me over). but it would’ve lost some of its power had i approached it as part of the “antiracist reading list” phenomenon highlighted by lauren michele jackson, writing here about toni morrison’s THE BLUEST EYE:
Every time I read the novel I am fascinated by how syntax expresses illness without pathology, how vernacular holds people together without fixing them. I am not sure if my attention would be drawn in the same way if I had approached Morrison’s fiction as a balm for my own latent racism and I am not sure what purpose the novel is meant to serve on an anti-racist list for someone desperate for understanding.
and i think that’s why it failed for these reviewers—because they were reading to learn about the wrongness of racism where evans slyly offers complexity. it’s funny: the effort i’m putting into justify my hot take of “complexity is good!” but to a particular discourse-poisoned brain (like my own), that is a complete hot take. how is it possible, that our commitment to the ambiguity of life is so often compromised by our desire for moral absolution, easy emotional gratification, and the (often necessary) urgency of political righteousness.
in searching for reviews, i rediscovered this interview with danielle evans, where she puts into words much of my frustration with mainstream literary coverage of her work. in her words, racist writing is not only a failure of one’s politics, but a failure of craft:
The question is not “How do we talk about race in the work of Black writers?” but “Why don’t we talk about it more in works by white writers?”
I almost never get asked to review white writers, for example. The one person who ever asked me to review a story collection by a white writer was a Black editor. People of color notice the absences, we notice the treatment of secondary characters, where the language gets weird. And that’s useful for everybody.
We should be talking about race more as a function of craft — of everybody’s craft. Maybe it shouldn’t be the first paragraph of every review, but it should be noted that books have a racial context. Conversations would be more interesting for it. Part of the answer is making that conversation present in more places, so it doesn’t feel hyper-visible when it’s focused on the work of Black writers.
I never want to give the impression that I don’t want to be identified as a Black writer — obviously, it’s an important part of what I do and part of my identity and writing. But reading reviews of my first collections, sometimes I wondered how people would describe the book if they had to wait until the second paragraph to mention race.
how, indeed. looking at these reviews, i find it almost sad, how little these writers seem to have gotten from her work—because they’re missing out. to reduce THE OFFICE TO HISTORICAL CORRECTIONS to a necessary critique of racism is a failure not only of one’s politics, but of criticism and critical thought. for the purveyor of the antiracist reading list, there’s a whole world to marvel at here, of devastation and beauty, of people just like you and me—if only you would take a look.
i’m sure someone has written about this problem, but my cursory google search for “books coverage problematic listicle” only returned headlines like “Top 10 Most Challenged Books Lists”—which, like, is the problem.
sidenote: why does this publication have such good coverage but such mediocre writing, lmao.
not going to say much about “anything could disappear,” but it is so heartbreaking and real it makes me cry every time i think about it (i’m tearing up as i type now).
subject of misogyny in show business is itself explored in another short story in THE OFFICE OF HISTORICAL CORRECTIONS, titled, incredibly, “why won’t women just say what they want.”