Contemporary tellings tend to mask the real horrors of the original Brothers Grimm stories and their ilk...Roxane Gay’s striking debut novel, An Untamed State, is a fairy tale in this vein, its complex and fragile moral arrived at through great pain and high cost … After Mireille’s captors release her, the book follows her attempts to piece herself back together. The ‘near-perfect recall’ that once let her pull up detailed memories of eating fresh sugarcane and Haitian fudge now works against her. In her traumatized state, present and recent past blur … Gay avoids the pat outcome of a Disney tale and, in an emotional and unforeseen twist, does the Grimms one better. In this fable, the princess and a wicked witch relate to each other as real women do, and ultimately rescue each other.
Owing to the power of Gay’s prose, the immediacy of the narrator’s voice and the graphic nature of this ordeal, it’s some of the most emotionally exhausting material I’ve ever read … In An Untamed State, she considers questions of class, parental responsibility and especially sex as a weapon of terror in a fantastically exciting novel … it’s easy to imagine An Untamed State pleading for the moral innocence of desperately poor people who have no options except crime and extortion … But the boundless savagery of Mireille’s kidnappers soon makes any kind of sociological apology for their behavior sound obscene. Despite the beatings she receives for talking back, she shreds her captors’ pompous class-warfare cant, refusing to let them imagine that the injustices they’ve suffered absolve them.
Dedicating the book to ‘women, the world over,’ Gay unflinchingly explores the hostility directed at her privileged character … Stubborn, fiery, and prone to swallowing her emotions before her kidnapping, Mireille is a difficult character for the reader to embrace. Her tough, at times dogmatic, viewpoint is even built into the direct and unequivocal prose, which can feel stifling for its lack of nuance. But it's the braver choice for the book to pick a thorny character to handle this ordeal … An Untamed State is a gem, blasted into beauty by the world's harshest conditions. This gripping debut has set the table for many great works to come.
The plot of this tightly wound psychological thriller is deceptively simple, centring not on a woman’s flight from Haiti, but a native daughter’s return to a country that has too frequently been viewed solely through the lens of political turmoil and poverty … Because the novel is told in the past tense, we know from the outset that Mireille will physically survive her ordeal, and in this way, Gay turns the thriller form on its head. Murder is not the ultimate crime here. The novel’s suspense is instead built around the question of what one woman’s body can endure as punishment for her father’s supposed misdeeds.
The book’s title refers to Haiti, and also to the condition to which Mireille’s trauma reduces her. She becomes a wild creature, frightened of nearly everything, including herself, and that doesn’t go away once she’s free. She has no trust left, certainly not for her father, and not even for gentle Michael. Any man could hurt her … Mireille’s psychological disintegration — not the fact of it, but the depiction of it — feels abrupt and imposed rather than organic. Likewise, Gay stacks the deck against Michael in the book’s second half, removing a great chunk of his intelligence and uniting the other characters in an unjustifiably low opinion of his husbandly behavior.
Written from Mireille's perspective, An Untamed State is an account of what is normally unaccountable: a level of trauma that, even if it is survived, is often too painful to relate … Gay has created a straightforward style and defiant voice that drive Mireille's recollections. Her captivity experience is suspenseful, immediate and at times mercilessly realistic. Mireille's memories of her time before the kidnapping provide a respite for her and the reader. Because Mireille is portrayed as a flawed, three-dimensional person, not just a symbol of suffering, Gay's novel puts a face, a name and especially a voice to the rampant global violence against women.
Roxane Gay’s riveting debut, An Untamed State, captivates from its opening sentence and doesn’t let go — even after the novel’s harrowing nightmare appears to be over … Gay’s writing is simple and direct, but never cold or sterile. She directly confronts complex issues of identity and privilege, but it’s always accessible and insightful … Let this be the year of Roxane Gay: You’ll tear through An Untamed State, but ponder it for long after.
At the center of this post-colonial narrative is Miri's father, whose refusal to pay the kidnappers not only prolongs but multiplies Miri's suffering needlessly … In the midst of horrifying poverty, his success is under constant threat by those who didn't make it, and needs constant protecting. To pay is to show weakness … Gay's gift for these intersectional subtleties is undeniable. Her writing is not always as seamless. Occasionally the prose bumps and strains, most often in describing Miri's relationship with Michael, her blond Midwestern husband … As in any story about trauma, the ending only seems happy because the worst has already happened. The body may heal in one lifetime, but hope may take longer to recover.
I applaud Gay’s courage: she writes candidly, vividly and necessarily about an emotionally exhausting subject that might turn off faint-hearted readers. Thankfully she provides respite from the horror, in the form of the pleasant memories that Mireille clings to, to keep from losing her mind … Gay acknowledges the role a despairing society has in growing these monsters; the poverty, the neglect, etc. But to her credit, not for one instance does she excuse their actions … In the second half of An Untamed State, Gay shines. This is an unforgettable look at a rape survivor struggling (and largely failing) to cope with the aftermath of her trauma.
Poet and short story writer Gay’s first novel delivers a searing portrait of a politically and economically divided Haiti, as seen through the lens of one family’s nightmare … Mireille’s desperate attempts to wrestle control from her kidnappers by sacrificing her body are deeply felt, but it’s the author’s unflinching portrayal of Mireille’s shattered physical and psychological state once she’s rejoined her husband and infant son that is at once disturbing and frighteningly resonant.
