Even when Miri is spiteful or erratic, her perspective feels more trustworthy than that of a man who packs an entire suitcase full of bottled water for a visit to his wife's rich Haitian relatives.
Michael is an all-American nice guy in contrast to Miri's prickly first-generation toughness, but he comes across as so doughy and naïve that it's hard to invest in the relationship. Occasionally the prose bumps and strains, most often in describing Miri's relationship with Michael, her blond Midwestern husband. Gay's gift for these intersectional subtleties is undeniable. But kidnappings remind us of slavery, and people can't handle that." Reginald Delva, Haiti's own secretary of state for public security, drew a similar analogy in 2012: "Haitians can take a lot of things, even an assassination.
Miri's captivity narrative can be understood as a potent metaphor for that history. "An Untamed State" is dedicated to "women, the world over," but this crime happens in Haiti, also the subject of Gay's first short story collection, "Ayiti." As in Teju Cole's "Every Day Is for the Thief," the crime is part of the routinized violence of a nation that was itself brutalized under centuries of colonial rule and slavery.
It also succeeds, more subtly, on another level. In 2011, in a scorching indictment of a New York Times article that seemed to assign partial blame to an 11-year-old for her own gang-rape, Gay called on journalists and novelists alike to write rape differently, finding "ways of rewriting that restore the actual violence to these crimes and that make it impossible for men to be excused from committing atrocities." As an experiment in this type of writing, the book succeeds brilliantly. Gay, a prolific feminist writer (she has a book of essays called "Bad Feminist" coming out this summer), has written cogently about rape culture.
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