The Red Word

The Red Word is a bit outside of my usual reading interests, but the subject matter sounded interesting and it was starting to win awards for Canadian fiction so I thought, what the hell, let's try it. I can't say that I enjoyed much of the book, but it felt more like it wasn't clicking with me than anything wrong with the book itself.

It's a bit hard to say anything notable about the plot without spoilers since the timeline jumps around a little and the catalytic event that really gets the plot moving doesn't happen until about half way through the book. Until then the protagonist — Karen — wanders between partying with her annoying frat boyfriend she doesn't seem to like and trying to fit in her new queer radical-feminist roommates. She develops some weird crush on a guy who's established, from his very introduction, to be a pretty shitty person. She also develops some sort of weird obsession with a professor built mostly on the fact that one of her roommates loves her. Minor events sort of happen around Karen, but she doesn't really do anything.

Once the plot kicks off... Karen still doesn't do much. She's around, she sees all the crazy stuff happening, she's in the middle of it all, but she's just kind of there. Things occasionally happen to her, instead of just around her, but she rarely handles things in a satisfactory matter and the biggest problems are solved by other people entirely. In a way, Karen is less of a protagonist than Charla or Dyann or even Bruce. If it wasn't for this book being written in a first-person perspective, this would be fine, but the only person we're following through the whole book is someone auxiliary to the entire plot.

One of the taglines that made me pick up this book was that it was an "unapologetic look at rape culture." And it certainly did look at rape culture, along with a pile of important themes attached to it. The book is about female agency, sexual freedom, beauty in destruction, breaking down mythology, internalized misogyny... if there is one thing I can applaud this book for, it's the range of themes it covered and covered well. The only problem is, by handling all these secondary themes it ended up turning the book into a borderline apologetic look at rape culture. Men are constantly excused and protected throughout the book, and the only punishments doled out for their misogyny are either slaps on the wrist or acts of god. The women get upset about it, but they either shrug and move on or take poor actions in an attempt to remedy matters. And in a way, this is a realistic look at how things go. Sexual assault is often swept under the rug, thus the whole #MeToo movement. But in a book specifically advertising that this is what it's about, I don't think anyone handled their assaults in a "good" way. No one cared that they were way too drunk to consent. No one cared to get a rape kit done. Hell, one character says that she highly recommends roofies if you're going to be assaulted because at least you won't remember anything. It's at times disappointing, at times gross, but never "unapologetic." There's always an excuse, a reason, and there's never any real justice. It's a condemnation of the culture without a way to fight back.

So, yeah. On the whole I wasn't a fan of the book. I expect a lot of that is personal issues and disappointments that other people won't experience while reading. But this is also outside of what I'd normally enjoy reading, and I'm not really the target audience, anyways. This is a book by women, for women, to let them know that it's not their fault and it has nothing to do with them — it's just that our culture is messed up and we somehow need to fix it.