Once you stop fighting – once you let this wave wash over you – you’ll see. It’ll wash over you so quickly, you won’t even feel it. You won’t feel the pain.
One of the blurbs on this debut novel features a comparison of the type that I typically find distinctly unhelpful and annoying: the classic “This new thing is old popular thing meets other old popular thing.” A = X + Y, one of the hoariest cliches in advertising and criticism. In this case, The Other Black Girl is “The Devil Wears Prada meets Get Out.” And, for once, I think, the old formula is actually pretty apt. The book wants to be a behind-the-scenes, often rather satirical exploration of a cutthroat industry that then becomes more of a high-concept thriller/horror with a lot of ideas related to racial prejudice and identity. From what I gather from a lot of the buzz online, a lot of people find this genre mixing element of the book to be where the book drops the ball; I read it for a book club and a lot of people in the club had similar feelings. From where I stand, I think it succeeds to near perfection and it’s one of the best, sharpest debuts I’ve read in a long time. Harris is definitely on my radar now as an author to keep an eye on.
The easiest way to boil down the basic set-up is that Nella Wagner, a black editorial assistant at a prestigious publishing firm, often feels like a token, the one black person allowed into this company, a bastion of whiteness, as most publishing firms are. When Hazel McCall is hired as another editorial assistant, Nella is at first thrilled that she’ll have a fellow African-American in this space. But it’s certainly no spoiler to say that there’s something a little off about Hazel and Nella finds herself spiraling into paranoia, uncertainty and anxiety, three things she’s already been plagued with her entire life. Nella is a fantastic main character and Harris is able to really put you inside her head and her emotional and mental experience of the world around her. Before the book eventually shifts tones into being more of a straight-forward thriller, Harris has already created a world where every interaction is a potential minefield of emotional tension and microaggressions. There’s a scene where Nella attempts to approach her boss and one of the firm’s authors with some racially based concerns she has about his new manuscript and Harris just ratchets the tension tighter and tighter. The feelings of dread run deeper than conspiracies and outright physical harm; it’s the constant existential dread of being out of place and in a world not built for you and Harris really pulls it off well.
And that’s ultimately why the book succeeds as well as it does. I did find the most effective stuff to be mainly in the first half when Harris is making the mundane everyday realities fraught with terror and panic. But the book absolutely sticks the landing in a way I feel like I rarely see. The final confrontation between the two central black girls is a beautifully written scene and it’s unsettling and frightening because of how quiet it is. Rather than going big at the end, Harris pulls us back down to the most personal level and the “climax” turns out to be a conversation. But it’s not a deflation or an anti-climax, but the very thing that, in my opinion at least, does push the book over into a subcategory of horror. It’s just a beautifully dark ending that really has a lot of emotional weight behind it. End of the day, it’s a book I absolutely love and I think it basically nails everything it goes for. 4 stars.
tl;dr – Devil Wears Prada meets Get Out blurb is actually pretty apt; well-characterized, sharp, satirical, filled with the anxiety and dread of the mundane, this one is a killer debut. 4 stars.