When a group of women awaken from a drugged sleep to find themselves imprisoned in a broken-down property in the middle of a desert, they have no idea where they are or how they came to be there. Doing hard labor under a sweltering sun, guarded by two inept yet vicious jailers, the prisoners soon learn what links them: in each woman's past is a sexual scandal with a powerful man. They pray for rescue but as the hours turn into days and the days into weeks and months, it becomes clear that the women must rescue themselves.
It brings me no joy to inform you that whatever might have seemed conceptually far out or even unthinkable in 2016 about the premise of The Natural Way of Things has been more than met by our current moment ... As perverse as it may sound, though, I would still invite you to throw yourself on this brier patch simply for the pleasure of Wood’s sentences, the rich and prickly wonder of her mind at work. She’s a rare kind of writer and a formidable one.
Ferocious ... Short, gripping ... Wood is clearly offering a metaphor for our own everyday world in which girls are 'slut-shamed' ... What keeps all this from seeming doctrinaire is the book's sheer imaginative intensity. Wood's writing crackles with vivid precision.
Whatever transformation occurs reflects the brute metamorphosis of character into symbol, not the fullness of realism or the vividness of fiction ... Wants us to see how a society that treats women as naturally inferior traps, exploits, and denigrates them. Unfortunately, her plot confines these characters to another narrow set of roles, and most of them are portrayed as incapable of leaving their cage. The novel ends with the group of women gleefully giving up their own lives in exchange for small bags of luxury cosmetics—a metaphor so reductive and condescending that it scans as misogynistic ... If I were being generous, I’d say that Wood is simply reproducing oppressive social structures in fiction in order to reveal them. But I know that she can address this problem better.
