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- General fiction - |
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Make Believe |
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 Make Believe byJoanna Scott Little, Brown 246 pages, 2000 ISBN 0316776165 Reviewed by Julie Failla Earhart Joanna Scott’s fifth novel Make Believe opens with Bo, a bi-racial four-year-old boy, dangling upside down from his car seat, hurting and bleeding. Covered by shattered glass and surrounded by police and EMS workers who are trying to free him from the crumpled SUV, Bo wonders about his mama. She has been thrown from the vehicle and is lying nearby, dead. With her death, Bo is now an orphan, his father having been murdered four months before his death. Not understanding the scene he is witnessing, Bo begins a stream-of-conscious dialogue that is disconnected and rambling. With the second chapter, the novel shifts to an emergency room where doctors and nurses are treating his injuries. An unidentified nurse wonders, again through stream-of-conscious dialogue, who the child is, where his parents are, and if the hospital staff will be able to save his life. The scenes’ tones should set an ominous tone, but lack tension and ravel into abstractedness. Bo survives his injuries, then becomes tangled in a tug-of-war between his two sets of aging grandparents. Marjory and Eddie Gantz, a white middle-class couple, now want to raise him, though they have had very little contact with the child. Erma and Sam Gilbert, a black middle-class couple, have loved and cared for the little boy since the moment of conception. The Gilbert's didn’t care if his mother was white; but the Gantz’s were bitterly embarrassed about their only grandchild’s black father. Unfortunately, the grandparents are so meagerly drawn and indistinguishable that I had to keep a chart handy to remind me who was who. Somehow, the Gantz’s are granted temporary custody of Bo, but how this happens remains unclear. The custody battle for Bo, which should be at the heart of this novel, was glossed over, and its outcome is never explained to my satisfaction. Make Believe misses the opportunity to make an important commentary on the swiftly changing nature of our society. The novel does not reflect the fragility of the American family structure when dealing with bi-racial couples, the effect it has on their children, and how it still tears families apart. The saving grace of this work is that it displays Scott’s ability to compose beautifully lyric prose. However, it does not compare to her other works, such as the 1997 Pulitzer Prize in Fiction finalist, THE MANIKIN. |
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