Monday, June 07, 2010

Men!

Did you get the sense that Zadie Smith took kind of a dim view of men as a group? Did you think her female characters were much more likable on the whole? (I don't mean this to sound like a leading question!)
Posted by at

2 comments:

cl said...

Good question! I can't decide whether the men just seemed collectively selfish (and varying degrees of delusional) or if they just remained in the forefront because most of the female characters were underdeveloped. I wrote earlier that there was a disappointing dropoff on Clara and Alsana's development, how they matured and grew as women in hasty marriages.

Alsana smelled a rat in the Chalfens, but once her husband took away one son, I think she was pretty helpless to keep her family together, though I appreciated the maddening way she dealt with him.

I think what I'm trying to say is that the older generation of women had such a reduced role of power in the families that their spouses and children ran unchecked with their bad decisions. Same with Joyce Chalfen's ignorant hero-worship of her husband.

Did the Chalfens have a daughter? I think they didn't -- maybe that's why Joyce had that blind admiration for the men surrounding her. And I still find it suspect that her yearnings to save Millat had more to do with his good looks and gender than some maternal instinct -- she dropped Irie pretty quickly.

I keep trying to get back to the men, but the women were so much more interesting ...

10:18 AM, June 13, 2010
kc said...

I also adored the way Alsana dealt with Samad! Genius! Never giving a straight answer, just letting him flounder in a sea of maybes and uncertainties. She also apparently had a nasty right hook! I laughed at the knockdown-dragouts, but honestly I had mixed feelings about the scenes of domestic violence. It wouldn't have been comical at all if he had been the "winner" in those encounters. And I wondered what Smith was trying to say about him by having him be the loser. Was it simply for comic effect? Or was she also trying to say something about the ineffectiveness of his manhood?

9:48 AM, June 15, 2010

Post a Comment

Subscribe to: Post Comments (Atom)