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language: English
country: Canada
year: 2019
form: short fiction
genre(s): literary
dates read: 4.6.22
finally read Téa Mutonji’s Shut Up You’re Pretty, which I’ve had a copy of since it came out. it was very good — in some ways a similar vibe to Cason Sharpe’s Our Lady of Perpetual Realness, but also very different in that while it’s also short fiction it’s linked short fiction, with a single consistent narrator and presented in chronological order, so in some ways it also reads as a novel. I think some of the stories could stand on their own, but some of them I think are too reliant on the linkages to really work independently. so, somewhere between a (very episodic) novel and a (very linked) collection. (I think the similar vibe to Our Lady of Perpetual Realness that I’m registering is probably at least in part just a coincidence in that both are about young, queer, poor, Black characters navigating adolescence and early adulthood (partly, in Sharpe’s case) in Toronto.)
I ended up giving it 4.5 stars on Storygraph; the narrative voice is very strong throughout the stories, but also it’s very consistent throughout the stories, which is why it’s not 5 stars — several of the early stories are from the narrator’s childhood and I didn’t feel like they quite succeeded in balancing a child’s perception against the adult narrator’s retroactive view of the events being narrated, especially in the dialogue, which at times felt a bit forced in the early chapters but much more natural later on. the dialogue also at times feels marked by French, which took me a second to realize but makes sense narratively since the narrator, like Mutonji herself, is an immigrant from DR Congo and — I suspect also like Mutonji although I don’t know for sure — went to French-language schools.
there’s a particular kind of frankness or directness (or matter-of-fact-ness?) that I associate with contemporary lgbtq writing that this extremely had. foregrounding “transgressive” or “challenging” material (sex, sexual violence, drugs, the realities of poverty and experiences of racism, also as a running background thing some kind of eating disorder) can be hit or miss sometimes — I loved it in Sharpe and hated it in Machado, for example — and always risks getting a little too self-satisfied about how “transgressive” it’s being (this was part of what annoyed me in Machado), but for me this was on the right side of the line between “shocking” and “pointing at itself and saying ‘see how shocking I am!’”.
the other thing that stood out to me is the very different weight given to the narrator’s relationships with women vs. with men, in terms of the handling of her sexuality — there was a lot of (both meaningless and meaningful) sex with men but comparatively little with women; the narrator’s attraction to women runs throughout, but so often it’s in the background (or shoved to the background) behind other kinds of relationships with women — friends, classmates, roommates — rather than foregrounded. obviously this is partly a reflection of the ways sexuality between women is shoved to the background, but also, given the sheer volume of sex in the book, the paucity of sex between women left me feeling like Loli’s attraction to women was kind of an afterthought at times. also something about homosexuality (or bisexuality) and childishness, with her most explicit sexual encounters with women happening with her childhood best friend rather than as an adult (compare the brief description of her affair with the woman in her 50s with her relationships with Dylan or Ben or even with the other two men in that story).
in any case, I liked it a lot and it was a very quick read — I spent just a couple hours on it this morning. strong and engaging voice, nicely contained stories that nonetheless are linked together really well, simultaneously quite dark and also, I found, light-hearted (or self-deprecating). would recommend.
moods: dark, grimy, horny, lighthearted