{"id":41903,"date":"2015-07-25T00:59:04","date_gmt":"2015-07-25T00:59:04","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.mixedracestudies.org\/?p=41903"},"modified":"2015-07-25T01:12:46","modified_gmt":"2015-07-25T01:12:46","slug":"review-oreo-a-sandwich-cookie-of-a-feminist-comic-novel","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/?p=41903","title":{"rendered":"Review: \u2018Oreo,\u2019 a Sandwich-Cookie of a Feminist Comic Novel"},"content":{"rendered":"

Review: \u2018Oreo,\u2019 a Sandwich-Cookie of a Feminist Comic Novel<\/a><\/strong><\/em><\/p>\n

The New York Times<\/a>
\n2015-07-14<\/p>\n

Dwight Garner<\/a><\/strong><\/p>\n

Fran Ross\u2019s<\/a> first and only novel, \u201cOreo<\/a>,\u201d was published in 1974, four years after Toni Morrison\u2019s<\/a> \u201cThe Bluest Eye<\/a>\u201d and two years before Alex Haley\u2019s<\/a> \u201cRoots<\/a>.\u201d It wasn\u2019t reviewed in The New York Times; it was hardly reviewed anywhere.<\/p>\n

It\u2019s interesting to imagine an alternative history of African-American fiction in which this wild, satirical and pathbreaking feminist picaresque <\/a>caught the ride it deserved in the culture. Today it would be where it belongs, up among the 20th century\u2019s lemony comic classics, novels that range from \u201cLucky Jim<\/a>\u201d and \u201cCold Comfort Farm<\/a>\u201d to \u201cCatch-22<\/a>\u201d and \u201cA Confederacy of Dunces<\/a>.\u201d<\/p>\n

These sorts of lists have been for too long, to borrow a line from the TV show \u201cblack-ish<\/a>,\u201d whiter than the inside of Conan O\u2019Brien\u2019s<\/a> thigh.<\/p>\n

\u201cOreo\u201d might have changed how we thought about a central strand of our literature\u2019s DNA. As the novelist Danzy Senna<\/a> puts it in her introduction to this necessary reissue: \u201c \u2018Oreo\u2019 resists the unwritten conventions that still exist for novels written by black women today. There\u2019s nothing redemptively uplifting about her work. The title doesn\u2019t refer to the Bible or the blues. The work does not refer to slavery. The character is never violated, sexually or otherwise. The characters are not from the South.\u201d<\/p>\n

Instead, in \u201cOreo\u201d Ms. Ross is simply flat-out fearless and funny and sexy and sublime. It makes a kind of sense that, when this novel didn\u2019t find an audience, its author moved to Los Angeles<\/a> in the late 1970s to write for Richard Pryor<\/a>…<\/p>\n

Read the review here<\/a>.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Review: \u2018Oreo,\u2019 a Sandwich-Cookie of a Feminist Comic Novel The New York Times 2015-07-14 Dwight Garner Fran Ross\u2019s first and only novel, \u201cOreo,\u201d was published in 1974, four years after Toni Morrison\u2019s \u201cThe Bluest Eye\u201d and two years before Alex Haley\u2019s \u201cRoots.\u201d It wasn\u2019t reviewed in The New York Times; it was hardly reviewed anywhere. […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[12,5,3601,8,820,20],"tags":[1340,7200,5235,2640,2327],"class_list":["post-41903","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-articles","category-book-reviews","category-judaism","category-media-archive","category-religion","category-usa","tag-danzy-senna","tag-dwight-garner","tag-fran-ross","tag-new-york-times","tag-the-new-york-times"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/41903","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=41903"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/41903\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":41906,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/41903\/revisions\/41906"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=41903"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=41903"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=41903"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}