In the March/April issue of The Women’s Review of Books I found a poignant essay by journalist and memoirist Vivian Gornick. Gornick had reviewed Dorothy Dinnerstein’s The Mermaid and the Minotaur in 1977, when the book was first published (I recalled the friend who recommended the book to me in the late ‘70s; I remembered the Leonard Baskin cover). Now Gornick was reflecting on a new paperback edition published by Other Press, 45 years after the Harper/Colophon original. Summarizing Dinnerstein’s Freudian-based argument, Gornick writes “that the major reason women and men can continue to make the sexual ‘arrangement’ they always have made—that he be dominant and she subordinate—is that women alone have been, and are pretty much still, solely responsible for child-rearing. To this day, a woman is mainly ‘the parental person who is every infant’s first love, first witness, and first boss, the person who presides over the infant’s first encounters with the natural surround and who exists for the infant as the permanent representative of the flesh,’ that which forever both attracts and repels.”
Returning to a book one has already reviewed is a writer’s gambit. Alert to the tone as well as the multiple frames of Mermaid’s discourse—psychoanalytical, anthropological, mythical—Gornick admires most its “poetic sympathy:” “Taut, pessimistic truths form its foundation…Yet a vein of love for all that we have and have not been, as well as all that we might yet be, runs through the entire book.” Most vividly, Dinnerstein’s decades-old thesis unearths a common root for our current social stasis. Gornick notes: “We cannot correct a myriad of self-evident injustices, just as we cannot free ourselves of childhood, because we don’t really want to.”
Gornick’s essay led me to reread Dinnerstein’s book, and I was halfway through when the May/June issue of WRB dropped through my mail slot. It features a review by Eisa Ulen of Zakya Dalila Harris’s thriller, The Other Black Girl. OK, I love that the journal will publish a review of a decades-old book in one issue, and a hot-off-the-press Good Morning America Book Club pick in the next. But what dazzles is the perspective each WBR reviewer brings to the page.
Eisa Ulen notices what other reviewers of The Other Black Girl don’t. She notes that Harris names her protagonist, the editorial assistant Nella, in homage to Harlem Renaissance author Nella Larson, and, like her “literary foremother…examines themes of disappearance, silence, and invisibility.” Ulen’s particular savvy joins literary history to New York publishing inside baseball. Nella’s friend Malaika, who correctly predicts that “one of your coworkers is gonna mix you and the new Black girl up at least once,” is named for Malaika Adero, “the one Black woman editor who worked at the very imprint that published Harris’s book.” Adero’s discovery of Zane, Atria’s “breakout voice of the 1990s whose steamy novels landed on the New York Times bestseller list,” parallels Nella’s pursuit of Jesse Watson, the Black internet star she’d like to sign for Wagner, the publishing house she works for. Ulen also draws on correspondences between Adero and Kendra Rae, a former Wagner editor whose disappearance drives Harris’s plot.
I’d read reviews of The Other Black Girl, but none had broached the surface of the narrative to confront the novel’s complex, history-driven DNA. And, though the reviews appeared in different issues, they led me to realize how Harris’s novel echoes Gornick’s perception of Dinnerstein’s work: “We cannot correct a myriad of self-evident injustices, just as we cannot free ourselves of childhood, because we don’t really want to.” I rely on the The Women’s Review of Books for juxtapositions that illuminate and broaden my reading life; the journal remains a source of information I won’t find elsewhere. Thanks to Old City Publishing, the Wellesley Centers for Women, and editor-in-chief Jennifer Baumgardner, plus all the editors and reviewers who have kept iterations of this intellectual project alive since 1983.