Patsy

Patsy by Nicole Dennis-Benn

This is an oceanic novel: holding the minute and the massive, the mysterious and the mundane, moving with all the quickness of eddies and the profundity of great swells. Taking place over the titular Patsy’s lifetime, the novel chronicles her youth--her treatment at the hands of her deeply religious mother and abusive stepfather, the passion she nurtures for her childhood friend and teenage lover Cicely, the way her pregnancy at age 23 settles around her like a net and an anchor--as well as her departure for New York, leaving her daughter, Tru, behind in pursuit of Cicely, and the years that come after. How Patsy is shoe-horned into domestic labor by her status as undocumented. How Patsy comes to find that the distance between her and Cicely seems larger when they live in the same US city than it did when Patsy was thousands of miles away in Jamaica. How Patsy and Tru become separated both by physical oceans and oceans of silence. How Tru grows up almost entirely in the aftershocks of her mother’s departure, at first longing and hoping for her, then settling into a disappointed bitterness, and eventually into an acrid despair.

Patsy and Tru are connected by the tension between the call of their hearts and the expectations of others—and the material limitations those expectations place upon them. These expectations and limitations are manifold. They include those of gender, sexuality, race, class, immigration status, age, parental status, and experiences of trauma. For both Patsy and Tru, their passions and desires, their deepest senses of their own selves, are weighed upon heavily by the force of these limiting expectations: even while bursting forth like precious, queer flowers, the ways in which Patsy’s and Tru’s self-expression are seen by others as aberrations or sins can still turn them dangerous, frightening.

Dennis-Benn is a skilled novelist. While this novel can absolutely be plumbed for political analysis, gorgeous symbolic imagery, commentary on nationhood, nationality, and immigration, and all of the aforementioned layers of identity, it reads as an unimaginably rich unspooling of characters, dialogue, and quick-footed narrative, never as an allegory or a screed. It’s a novel to sink into, to gasp at, to lounge against, to cry over—it’s also a novel deeply worth listening to as an audiobook. Masterfully read by Sharon Gordon, the audiobook captures the various characters’ accents in a more visceral way than any book can, and also highlights the presence and absence of patois, and how these presences and absences pattern throughout the different settings and communities depicted within Patsy.

My only quibble with this book was the ending which, while satisfying in a way, was such a quick and fairytale resolution to a novel otherwise so complex and thorough that it felt incongruous. That being said, Patsy is a modern classic, a novel about categories and bonds and how they can be defied, survived, and redefined, and a thoroughly enjoyable big read.