Do You like book Oreo (2000)?
Um, wow?This book was amazing. Drawing on the absurd side of Joyce, or of a more timely ilk, Flann O'Brien, with a particularly American bitter optimism and absurdity that reminded me most of Vonnegut, on top of the myth of Theseus! But more importantly a weird little time capsule of 60sish Philly and New York through the eyes of a half-black/half-Jewish girl who is very tough and super-cool and gets into all kinds of ridiculous situations. Also, the Jewish/Southern/made-up/absurd intellectual dialect was effortless and enjoyable -- learning a new language for a book can be terrible or really fun, and it was much the latter here. It was very intently multicultural without being PC or offensive or didactic or mushy or preachy. Like say, Oscar Wao, but ten times better and less self-conscious. The one star off is for the strictures of the Greek Myth plot, which left it less than totally wrapped up as a narrative. Basically this book went back and forth between reality and fantasy and someplace in-between effortlessly and in an utterly unique way -- since Ross never wrote another novel (though she did right for Richard Pryor!), there will never be anything like this. Read it, make your friends read it, consider owning it! It was super-good.
—Emilia P
Another lady-book to convince the fanboys of Helen Dewitt's The Last Samurai (and, by extension, Ulysses) that women not only make great authors, too, but can spin contemporary-minded mythic gold out of ancient misogynist straw as well as any Joyce.Witty, erudite, playful, fun, and whip-smart, Oreo (the book and the character) was an absolute joy to spend time with. I found her much more enthralling (and present) company than inscrutable, wonky Ludo from The Last Samurai, and Ross's sheer brilliance shone through in a much less grating way for me than Dewitt's. Any reasonably intelligent person has to admire projects like Dewitt's and Joyce's, but enjoying them is a whole other thing -- for me at least, the constantly allusively hiccuping text and the ever-present, inscrutable need to intellectually preen on every page gets to be a bit of a grind after a while. Not so with Oreo, which not only offers a handy guide to the myth of Theseus at the end to help the reader follow breezily along (should they wish to), but is so bursting with the pleasure of language and the plurality of cultural experience that you hardly realize the chore of reading about tired Greek myths at all. (PS. I majored in classics in college, so I'm allowed to say that.)PPS. This is the terrible 2015 New Directions cover of the book (why such an obvious design for such a subtle book?), so please be sure to peep the original 1974 Greyfalcon House edition cover -- which the thoughtful 2015 edition afterword by Harryette Mullen (who rediscovered Oreo) actually discusses. Playful and sly just like the text, and referencing the "clevice"-mezuzah-Aegeus unveiling scene that is the climax of the quest. Makes you want to dive right in, nu?
—A
So far ahead of its time it's not even funny, and also a genuine work of genius, I think. I say genius, even though it's not earth-shatteringly revelatory or even all that interesting as a story - it's all in the way she tells it, and even that verges on the sickeningly precious at times. But when you add up the sheer chopsiness of the prose, the beautiful absurdity of the characters, a handful of absolutely indelible images (the sequence with the pimp and the elastic hymen will stay in my head forever), and the time and place in which Ross was writing, it all adds up to genius in my book, as surely as one of Oreo's mom's mental equations. The central conceit of the book - that it's based on the myth of Theseus - reads like a fuck-you to anyone who thought that a black woman couldn't be a classicist, rather than as an integral part of the story. The second half of the book, where Oreo goes off on her quest, is for the most part weaker and more arbitrary than the first half, as the story gets unnecessarily jerked around by the vicissitudes of the myth. The ending is, as a result, kind of a damp squib. I would rather have spent more time with Oreo's family, who are as lovely a collection of puissant eccentrics as one is likely to find outside of J.D. Salinger. Still and all, the sheer wonder of this book having come into existence at all - and the tragedy of it going unrecognized during the author's life, and the waste of her not being given the time and money to fulfill her potential as an author - makes this an unmissable read, and a five-star effort.
—Isaac
