I'm new to Oates, which seems impossible given the rates at which both she writes and I read, but it's true. This is the first of her works that I've read, and as ornery as my reviews have been lately, I have to give this one a rave. Despite its title, Oates' novel avoids simple constructions of black and white to offer the reader a complex range of characters, plot, and drama.
Oates tells the story, based on actual events at a college campus in the 1970s, as "a text without a title," a "personal inquiry" by Generva (Genna) Hewett-Meade, who has been haunted for 15 years by the death of her college roommate. Genna is the white girl of the title, a descendant of the Quakers who founded the exclusive Schuyler College where the action of the story takes place. Her roommate, Minette Swift, is a merit scholar from Washington D.C., the daughter of a black preacher.
An author could get plenty of mileage out of this odd couple arrangement, but Oates doesn't let herself get lazy with her storytelling. This is not a case of white/establishment v. black/underprivileged. Genna's father, Max Meade, is a radical activist lawyer whose ties to Vietnam protestors, the Black Panthers, and various left-wing fugitives from justice have him under constant F.B.I. surveillance. Her parents' untraditional marriage, her mother's drug use, and the parade of Max's acolytes in and out of her life make Genna an outcast in the very college her family founded. Minette, on the other hand, comes from a conservative and eminent background. Whereas Genna's father is running from the law, the Reverend Swift is a powerful and well-regarded minister profiled in The Beacon magazine. Minette feels morally, spiritually, and intellectually superior to her classmates, which of course makes her as much as outcast as Genna.
Because of her snobbery, Minette is viciously persecuted by her peers, both black and white. Her bedroom window is smashed in the middle of the night, her belongings go missing only to be found defiled, and Minette discovers the message "go home niggr [sic]" in her mailbox. The more she suffers, the more Genna reaches out to her, hoping that they can comfort each other in their aloneness. But the more she suffers, the more Minette pushes Genna away, hardening more and more in her defensive self-righteousness.
Minette meets a tragic end, as we've known from the novel's beginning, but Oates chooses to end not with Minette's death, but with Genna visiting her father in prison, bringing him the manuscript that is this novel. This ending adds a new layer to the book; suddenly it becomes not a book about black and white but about fathers and daughters. Both Genna and Minette worship and are ruled by their fathers, even (especially?) in their absence. Genna lives for the five minutes on the phone with her mercurial dad, and Minette calls home daily, steeping herself in the religiosity that is the mode of her life her father has laid out for her. There is an Electra aspect to these relationships, of course. Oates doesn't hesitate to describe, through Genna's childhood eyes, Max's bald head as "an upright blood-engorged penis." But the analysis of father-daughter relationships in what is ostensibly a book about relationships serves another purpose.
Looking back 15 years after Minette's death, Genna admits that she's only beginning to understand the many nuances of race relations (as are we, 55 years after Brown v. Board of Education). She wonders if the abuse "hadn't been purely personal, aimed against Minette Swift as an individual, and not 'racist,'" and simultaneously realizes "how swiftly and crudely the personal becomes the racial."
The story of Genna Meade and Minette Swift so quickly and easily becomes Black Girl/White Girl, a faceless, nameless construction. When we focus on people instead of stereotypes, we can make racism disappear, but as Genna/Oates says, the personal "swiftly and crudely" becomes the racial.
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