His hair brushed my forehead and my neck and I arched into him like I was hoping to conjoin our rib cages. Then he was inside me and I gasped as he opened my body, a sharp ache spreading up through my stomach and down through my heels and he was shoving his tongue into my sour mouth, groaning loudly while he fucked me steady and hard. The edge of a step dug into my back painfully. He bit into my neck and fumbled with his jeans, trying to shove them down with one hand while he pulled my pants down with his other hand. Michael started pushing me back toward the staircase. They are rough and aggressive with each other from the beginning: Yet everything is not soft and gentle between Michael and Mireille. “North Country” and “The Year I Learned Everything”). Fans of Gay’s short fiction will find this exciting, intimate storyline reminiscent of some earlier work (i.e. Woven through the story of the kidnapping is the courtship of Mireille and her husband Michael. There is some space carved out in the book for love and even romance. “There were things inside me still not set right.” “I wanted to remember what it felt like to move without being chased,” she says. She may no longer be physically restrained by her captors, but the lasting physiological impact of the experience will be just as punishing. There is no justice here, no moment of victory and celebration for Mireille and her family. By the time she is released, she hardly remembers the person she was before. To surrender, she has to forget who she is, to become another woman altogether. Of course, no matter how hard she fights, Mireille is just one woman at the mercy of a gang of men, and to survive she must occasionally surrender. The barrel of his gun dug sharply into the back of my neck. I kicked back and connected with his knee. I could only think of one word, fight… My escort began fumbling with the waistband of my jeans, his fingers pressing against the bones of my hips as he tried to tug my pants down.
Tiny shards burrowed into my arms, creating tiny but very sharp dots of pain. I threw my arms in front of my face as he pushed me forward, tried to slam my head into the mirror. She does not prove to be an easy prisoner-resisting, struggling, and fighting back at every opportunity: Back in the states, she is a partner and cofounder of a law firm. Mireille is a strong-willed woman, independent, persistent, and sometimes stubborn.
The men demand a hefty ransom from Mireille’s father, who refuses to pay in order to protect the rest of his family. These captors hold her hostage for thirteen days, during which she is repeatedly assaulted and raped. While vacationing in this city with her husband and infant son, she is kidnapped by men driving black SUVs and carrying automatic rifles. First-generation Haitian American Mireille is the daughter of a successful businessman in Port-Au-Prince. This is Gay’s debut novel, evolved from the short story “Things I Know About Fairy Tales,” originally published here at Necessary Fiction in 2009. The result is a story of sharp focus that will have a lasting impact even on a desensitized population of readers accustomed to sex and violence in movies, music, and television.
What makes the novel difficult is the content, and especially the way Gay approaches the content: with full-forced, head-on, unapologetically clear writing about the kidnapping and rape of a young mother. This isn’t a plot or character issue, nor a problem of challenging vocabulary.