Book Review: The Office of Historical Corrections
Written By: Astrid Ramsay (Senior Book Seller)
The Office of Historical Corrections, Danielle Evans’s collection of short stories, felt like a book that desperately wanted to be about everyday life but kept getting held up by bigotry. Microaggressions abound: Lyssa, the book’s first protagonist, can’t perform in the princess parties her company throws because her presence would be “historically inaccurate.” (She works at a replica of the Titanic.) In “The Office of Historical Corrections,” Cassie, a field worker at the fictional Institute of Public History, constantly tries to curate a persona that’s both approachable and competent and eats at only two restaurants because she can’t be bothered to charm new waitstaff. The Institute itself uses her to show off their supposed progressivism even as they clash with (and eventually fire) Genevieve, their more “militant” black employee. That much might be expected of any book about black women, as unfair as that is. But this one is just as heavy with grief, and it’s cruel to see how often racism intrudes into what should be a personal experience. Lyssa’s mother has ovarian cancer, and Lyssa’s faith in her mother’s recovery is marked by calculated choices to straighten her hair, wear clothes she can’t afford to doctor’s appointments, and do whatever else she can to convince the doctor that her mother deserves real medical care. When that faith disappears, she stops bothering to be anything but herself, and I both loved and hated how much that felt like a defeat.
All of these experiences are described with matter-of-fact bleakness. The writing isn’t quite detached, but the characters’ feelings lack immediacy. It feels like we’ve caught them in a moment of introspection–or, more accurately, like they’re so severely alienated from themselves that they can dissect their lives without any real emotion getting in the way. And it makes me wonder: could they do this so well if living as black women hadn’t taught them always to consider how others would see them?
Unsurprisingly, this book deals heavily with whiteness. Most of the white characters are merely unaware of their privilege, but a few are more interesting. Claire, the protagonist of “Boys Go to Jupiter,” is a college student who blithely poses for a photo in a Confederate flag bikini, then retaliates against a black dorm-mate who calls her out on Twitter. (Yes, I know.) She’s self-centered in the way that so much of White FeminismTM is: she quietly resents the smarmy condescension of the alt-right men who defend her but refuses to see that “ironically” adopting their rhetoric herself is even more harmful. “The Office of Historical Corrections'' has The Free Americans, Evans’s take on groups like the Proud Boys. They “hear the ticking clock of the question, the Do they know I’m human yet?” and “[take] delight in saying no…[take] for granted that it [will] always be their question to answer.” They see the Institute of Public History as a leftist attack on white identity—they’re the ones who call it “The Office of Historical Corrections” in a misaimed Orwellian critique—and are willing to use violence to maintain that sense of self. Cassie encounters a Free American on a job, and he has all the seething faux-earnestness we expect of white supremacists nowadays. The women in his family are like Claire, vaguely disapproving of the men’s overt racism but offering little more than limp outrage and tacit compliance. In the end, whatever fragile allyship these women had with the black people in their lives is abandoned for something more powerful.
My favorite story, “Why Won’t Women Just Say What They Want,” strikes at the heart of this book. In it, a famous male artist disappears from the public eye for months and resurfaces to create performance art in the form of apologies to all the women in his life. This story best shows off Evans’s skill as a writer. It focuses on more than a dozen characters (all unnamed except one, who’s a non-entity), so there’s little time to go too deeply into their thoughts. But this is an advantage: Evans’s open-faced writing style provides all the emotionality and immediacy of any movie because the characters’ actions need to communicate their intent. And her clever choice to define all the women by their relationship to the Artist shows us almost immediately where the power lies. The story itself dives deeper and deeper into his true nature, starting with the almost cartoonishly childish “apologies'' he gave to his ex-wives before he disappeared and ending by revealing just what lengths he’d gone to belittle and control the women around him. The Artist is abusive, manipulative, and above all entitled, and Evans does well to emphasize the women’s struggle to divorce their self-image from his understanding of them without moralizing their choices. Their emotional arcs resonate across the book, and as a young woman who still struggles with self-image, these characters truly spoke to me.
I hope the stories this book has to offer will speak to you, too.
Picture by Kelly Johnson from cupcakesandcashmere.com
