The Red Word
Sarah Henstra
In his book The Once and Future Liberal Mark Lilla has a line about the so-called culture wars where he describes the process through which “the retreating New Left turned the university into a pseudo-political theater for the staging of operas and melodramas.”
That’s something that came to mind when reading Sarah Henstra’s The Red Word, which is a campus novel about a group of activist college feminists in the 1990s whose greatest coup de théâtre is presenting a rape (that’s the red word) as an act of performance art.
A Separate Peace for the MeToo generation? Henstra is a smart writer and must have been aware of the danger. I don’t think she entirely avoids it either, but The Red Word is raw and complex enough to avoid going too far down that road, indulging instead its own version of the mythic method and managing to address the politics of the moment without being political itself in any of the usual, obvious and programmatic, ways.
goodreports.net 