THE VIRGINIAN-PILOT
Copyright (c) 1996, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: Sunday, July 28, 1996 TAG: 9607300518
SECTION: COMMENTARY PAGE: J3 EDITION: FINAL
TYPE: Book Review
SOURCE: BY WENDY ANNE GROSSMAN
LENGTH: 81 lines
PUSH
SAPPHIRE
Alfred Knopf. 142 pp. $20.
Women can overcome any obstacle. That's the message of Sapphire's new novel, Push.
Precious Jones has been raised on welfare in Harlem. She is illiterate. At 16, she is pregnant for the second time, and once again, the child is her own father's. Her mother has no sympathy: she kicks her daughter in the head and calls her a whore for stealing her husband.
Yet by the end of this brief novel, Precious has learned to read, has delivered a healthy baby (the first had Down syndrome), and moved out of her mother's house and into the solace of support groups.
It's a nice idea: a fairy tale that comes true. The only problem is, I didn't believe in Precious.
Classic fairy tales like Cinderella seemed believable because the heroine didn't know her life would get better. The genre's convention is that the heroine must be handed a raw deal by life (which Sapphire established almost too well).
But she had to believe that the drudgery, pain and misery will continue forever. She couldn't be obviously on the lookout for her fairy godmother, as Precious was: ``Everyday I tell myself something gonna happen, some shit like on TV. I'm gonna break through or somebody gonna break through to me - I'm gonna learn, catch up, be normal, change my seat to the front of the class.''
Enter on cue Ms. Blue Rain, Precious's new teacher for the pre-GED program. The exchange between Rain and Precious is straight out of a twelve-step manual. She tells Precious that she's smart. She's beautiful. She does not deserve the treatment her father gave her. Her sorry situation is not her fault. She is not to blame. She will be fine. And of course, Ms. Rain loves her.
It should have been uplifting. Instead, the pop-psychology rap almost made me gag.
The first 40 pages were great. Precious was believable as a strong-willed girl who's determined not to let people push her around. They still do, but at least she fights it.
But after meeting Ms. Rain, Precious becomes insecure; she writes pitiful notes to her teacher. And it's hard to accept that the first book Precious reads is The Color Purple. My first went something like this: ``The fat cat sat on the mat. Look at the cat. He is very fat.'' I might have believed in Precious watching the movie or reading along to books on tape to get the message - but I don't believe she just picked up an Alice Walker novel and read it right off.
In a few short months she's reading Langston Hughes, Audre Lourde and Lucille Clifton. All good, strong black writers. Then Precious starts writing her own poetry, quoting William Blake. This doesn't seem like realistic material for a pre-GED program.
Sapphire anticipated some of my complaints. She writes: ``Ms. Rain say one of the criticizm of The Color Purple is it have a fairy tale ending. I would say, well, shit like that can be true. Life can work out for the best sometimes. Ms. Rain love Color Purple too but say realizm has its virtues too.''
Now, if Sapphire knew that I was going to close her novel feeling grouchy, and say that I didn't believe in her happily-ever-after scenario, then why did she write it that way? Yes, ``realizm'' has it's virtues. That's exactly why the stark prose of the first 40 pages of Push took my breath away.
By story's close, Precious is still waiting for her happy ending, even though everything that could go wrong for one person had already gone awry in her world. Even though she overcame all these obstacles one by one.
It's not that I don't believe good things can happen. I just don't believe this author's version of the story. Every women's studies issue was tackled in this slim volume, and Sapphire created convenient solutions to each of them. Precious rapidly metamorphoses from an abused, ignored, homophobic and illiterate girl into a young woman who's proud of herself, accepting of all people, and is (too speedily) self-educated.
Yet despite her new-found abilities, she still couldn't score high enough on tests to take the regular GED class. Somehow, that just didn't make sense. But it's the only part of the story I believed. MEMO: Wendy Anne Grossman is a staff intern who recently graduated from
Duke University. by CNB