The Professor's Daughter

There's too much to say about this novel, so I shall leave it to a few short comments: Raboteau's advance stylistic techniques are a pleasure to read. Her fragmented chronological order is quite Tarantinoesque. You find yourself in a love/hate relationship with each of the characters, and the supreme irony is poetic yet unsettling. 5 stars. It doesn't get much better.

I found this book riveting, from the first page to the last. Ms. Raboteau's writing is deft, assured, and daring. I was transported throughout the reading and willingly went anywhere the prose took me--and it took me many places (from a train wreck to a lynching to a boarding school to Ethiopia to the bedside of a formerly vital loved one who has become a "vegetable" to a flying dream state and more). Really, the writing just sings and the themes of race and belonging and identity are as timely as they are timeless. A wonderful, wonderful book.

The Professor's Daughter is Emma Boudreaux, a young woman who is struggling with the loss of her older "spiritual twin" brother, Bernie (Bernard Boudreaux III), who dies after a brief coma following a freak accident. Emma has long been a victim of physical and emotional abandonment from her father, the world renowned Yale professor, Bernard Boudreaux II, but her brother's death seems to exacerbate her "condition" and pushes her over the edge. Emma's "condition" is that of self-doubt originally stemming from her ethnicity (her father is African American, her mother Caucasian) and the struggles of trying to fit into a world that is largely black or white. She leans heavily on her brother as her strength during the early childhood years when she is taunted by other children. She becomes somewhat of a recluse, excelling academically while learning to "disappear" or become "invisible" in order to avoid the negative attention her physical appearance seems to attract. But this is not merely a tale of the tragic mulatto - it goes deeper - and Raboteau's beckoning style sets the tone perfectly. There's an expression, "the fruit does not fall far from the tree," and although Emma was somewhat of an enigma, I found the professor's character more intriguing and complex. Within him lies inner struggles and conflict that were seemingly inherited by his son with residual turmoil passed to Emma. The professor is a brilliant man with violent and poor roots originating in the Mississippi Delta. He is very secretive and guarded about his family history. It is in his recollections that we learn he was orphaned at an early age by a traumatic event that led his mother to madness and his father to an untimely death. His journey from the poor house to the white tower is fraught with discrimination, abuse, humiliation, and loneliness. He blocks the memories of his painful childhood with disastrous results - his unresolved issues affect his life and children in a most profound manner. The novel is partly narrated by Emma recapping her life in a series of recollections. She reminisces about past lovers, her childhood, her college years, her self-imposed sabbatical to Brazil - complete with all the drama, longing, misery, and heartbreak that come with searching for oneself and trying to uncover the "mystery" behind her grandfather's (Bernard I) passing. Raboteau takes interesting tangents along the way - cleverly supplementing the novel with Ethiopian and Sioux folklore that makes the story even more enchanting in an unconventional kind of way. I will admit that this novel is not for everyone; however, I enjoyed it from its opening passages. I found it to be perfectly paced and very well written. Reviewed by Phyllis APOOO BookClub The Nubian Circle Book Club

Emily Raboteau wrote a good story in Callaloo that I remember being sort of the same storyline as this, three of four years ago, and at the time I wrote down her name as a writer to watch out for. Here we get the whole nine yards. The novel has a sort of Willa Cather flavor to its title (remember THE PROFESSOR'S HOUSE?), and Raboteau's combination of delicacy and broad strokes do call to mind a young Willa Cather. But other bodies of writing are part of Raboteau's project too. I think everyone who reads this marvelous novel will feel, like the blind man and the elephant, that she has grasped at least a good chunk of social and moral America that has never before been adequately described or taxonomized. "The Professor's Daughter" sounds like a bookish title too, and this isn't that imaginary book, but a novel of raw power like Ellison's INVISIBLE MAN or Richard Wright's THE LONG DREAM. It is rather like Terms of Endearment written on a bigger scale, but with the same imaginative sympathy that Larry McMurtry brought to his suffering mother and daughter. Here Emma (even the same name as the character Debra Winger played in the film version of Terms) isn't the one in the hospital, no, here it is her brother Bernard, the brother she has idealized for so long as the strong one, the tentpole in the family, now in a coma, a helpless mass of silent body parts. From this deracinated body she must exercise all her powers of analysis to determine what happened to her brother, what happened to her family, and what happened to white and black people over the whole troubled course of American history. The storyline travels in jumps through time, back into the past and then abruptly, into the present while Emma cogitates. Strange fragments of dreams take precedence from page to page over the ordinary privilege of narrative. And we get a fair amount about the Negro Leagues too, so you might want to brush up on Ken Burns' BASEBALL video.

A glittering debut from a young author who is definitely going places. Raboteau molds her characters with a delicate, cunning hand. I had the sense that she took great care in polishing the book because the story seemed to flow effortlessly, almost as if Emma, Bernie, and others were propelling themselves. Raboteau's skill is most striking in small descriptions, in details, where her style is poignant, sometimes disarmingly brilliant. If you haven't read "Kavita Through Glass" in The Best American Short Stories 2003, you're missing out. There, too, Raboteau makes the most out of subtlety and understatement, speaking with a quiet voice that somehow resounds.