Book Review: Post (Arley McNeney)Reviewed by Adam PottleIn her foreword to her novel Sula, Toni Morrison discusses a dilemma that many African American authors face. Morrison asks, "What could be so bad about being socially astute, politically aware in literature?" (xi). She explores the issue by detailing how American book reviewers reacted to her first novel, The Bluest Eye. She states that, if a reviewer thought her novel was good, "it was because it was faithful to a certain kind of politics; if it was bad, it was because it was faithless to them" (xii). Artistry did not enter into the equation. In response to her dilemma, Morrison turned to truth: "my only option was fidelity to my own sensibility…And since my sensibility was highly political and passionately aesthetic, it would unapologetically inform the work I did" (xiii). The situation Morrison describes—that political fiction cannot be art; that a book about black people is only as good as its politics—pertains as much to novels about disability as it does to novels about black people. Many books that explore disability are unequivocally praised simply because they present a progressive view of disability. Reviewers of such books seldom mention whether the authors' prose is lean and crackly, or whether the books' forms are original, or whether the plots are surprising and refreshing, or whether the characters are unique and relatable. In other words, reviews of such books seldom mention the books' artistry. Where disability narratives are concerned, politics often precede aesthetics. Whenever I read a novel that prominently features disability, I am always forced, by virtue of my academic specialization and my status as an artist with a disability, to separately consider two things: the book's politics and its aesthetics. As an academic, I study how Canadian authors portray disability in their fiction, and I rarely encounter a Canadian novel that is both aesthetically pleasing and, from a disability perspective, politically affirming. An aesthetically pleasing novel contains a high level of artistry: everything is in its proper place, and the author structures his/her novel in an original and invigorating manner. A politically affirming novel suggests that disability is dynamic, that it is a part of who we are rather than a stigma that warrants segregation. In my experience, novels about disability tend to focus more on their politics than their artistry. Arley McNeney's 2007 novel Post (Thistledown Press) is one such novel. Post tells the story of Nolan Taylor, a former Canadian Paralympian who undergoes surgery to correct her arthritic hip. From a disability perspective, Nolan's story is quite affirming: her surgery, which is meant to normalize her, causes her to have an identity crisis. She does not know whether she is disabled or normal; eventually, her surgery reveals to her that disability is her normal. To that end, McNeney frequently links disability and selfhood. Nolan calls an old surgical scar the "best skin" (10) she has; she calls her limp her "body's accent" (11); she calls her disability her "personality" (269). So when she has her surgery, she has quite a bit of difficulty deciding where she belongs. This period of transition from disabled to normal is fraught with challenges. Nolan no longer plays wheelchair basketball, and so is no longer occupied and has no grant money coming in; her boyfriend, Quinn, soon quits his job to play guitar in a band; and she eventually becomes pregnant. When Nolan's body is in flux, so is her selfhood. Nolan's romantic relationships concretize her identity crisis: she is stuck between Quinn, who is able-bodied, and Darren, her quadriplegic basketball mentor with whom she had a relationship several years prior. Although she lives with Quinn, and although Quinn eventually gets her pregnant, Nolan is clearly more comfortable with Darren, which the novel suggests through its frequent flashbacks. Nolan in fact loses her virginity to Darren, and McNeney's description of the scene demonstrates how comfortable Nolan is as a disabled person: Looking back, you could never have imagined the first time with anyone but him. His disability made him exactly right: narrow lower body fitting between the acute angle of your legs that the inflexible hip caused. Something about your bodies fit, though it was no position you'd ever heard of. You couldn't bend and he could bend too much and together you found a right angle. (107) It appears that Nolan and Darren are built for each other, that Nolan is supposed to keep her arthritic hip and remain exactly as she is. What is usually seen as unnatural seems perfectly natural, and that is something McNeney does quite well: she demystifies the unfamiliarity of disability. Unfortunately for Nolan, hip pain and complications with Darren's ex, Valerie, intervene, so Nolan elects for surgery, and attempts life as an able-bodied person. But that life never materializes. Even though the surgery relieves Nolan's hip pain, she retains her limp. Her doctor tells her that "'After twenty-odd years of limping, it's all you know how to do. You've never walked properly in an adult body'" (269). Nolan, then, cannot be normalized. To complicate things further, she becomes pregnant, a condition that McNeney frequently associates with illness and disability: she calls the baby a "blood-borne virus" (416). It is as though normalcy—being a mother, being able-bodied, being in an adult relationship—is in itself disabling. As a result, Nolan dips into her memories of wheelchair basketball, seeking comfort from the past. Nolan—and Darren, for that matter—show that disabled people can be high-performance athletes as well as sexually active, dissolving the stereotypes that disabled people are neither. Nolan, Darren, and their wheelchair basketball cohorts attend tournaments, win medals, have sex, talk dirty, and play dirty. McNeney, a former wheelchair basketball player herself, astutely captures this world. One can almost smell the sweat scumming up the gymnasium walls. At times, McNeney seems to take glee in circumventing disability stereotypes, as evidenced by the following conversation between Nolan and a few of her co-ed teammates, during which they debate calling their team "The Handicaps":
"It's not insulting for gimps to call each other gimps," said Darren. "It's like how black
people can use the N word. Plus, a little thing we like to call irony. What do they call it?
There's a word for it. Nolan, you're in school. What's the term for disabled people using the
word 'cripple?'" Such conversations in fiction are valuable, for they seldom take place and they show that disability can be humorous. Indeed, humour is a crucial part of reclaiming such language, and McNeney sprinkles humour throughout the novel. To laugh is to reclaim. To laugh is to be free. While Post is politically reclamatory, the novel is, unfortunately, aesthetically dissatisfying. At 462 pages, it is slow, skidding, and at least 100 pages too long. McNeney is unable to sustain Nolan's defiant tone. She stretches the narrative thin while creating little suspense; at times, it is almost as though McNeney tries to fill pages rather than tell a story. There is too much rumination and too little incidence, and while there is humour, the laughs are too far apart. McNeney also includes passages from Darren's, Quinn's and Nolan's father's perspectives. While she may have been trying to counter Nolan's point of view, these excursions into these other characters do not contribute much to the novel; they feel too much like change for the sake of change, and not for the sake of the story. Even worse, they vitiate Nolan's defiance. A good edit would have helped concentrate the novel's energies and bring its tone more in line with its form. While, as Toni Morrison's body of work attests, it is possible for a novel to be both politically engaging and artistically astute, McNeney's novel unfortunately tips in one direction. Post presents important challenges to disability stereotypes and, more significantly, the idea of normalcy, but it does not succeed on an artistic level.
|