THE UNVEILING, by Quan Barry
Dear Mike White and Jordan Peele, have you met? If not, you should, ideally right after reading “The Unveiling.” I say this because Quan Barry’s latest novel, about a Black woman’s freaky and frightening experiences on a luxury cruise in Antarctica alongside the rich, blends White’s penchant for delicious, violent satire of the uber-privileged and Peele’s skill at using humor, psychological collapse and flat-out horror to reveal racism afresh.
“The Unveiling” follows Striker, a snarky film location scout from New York. A Black woman on the cusp of 40, Striker is carrying a lot — she was raised in a Catholic orphanage, then adopted by white parents alongside her sister, who later died. Now she’s a woman living on her own terms, which include keeping memories of her sister at a distance. “I have built my identity around forgetting in the name of healing,” she says.
She’s on the Antarctica cruise for a job: She has to take photographs for a possible movie about the early-20th-century explorer Ernest Shackleton. On the ship, Striker’s surrounded by an array of wealthy white people, including garrulous gay dads and their remote young daughter; an earnest-to-abrasive couple from Texas and their unruffled, encyclopedically intelligent nonbinary teenager (a saintly characterization that risks cliché); a tech mogul and her loathsome, beta-male husband; and a brittle older couple whom Striker nicknames the Dame and Baron.
Striker is hyper-aware of her racialized self in this environment, especially because of how the white passengers react to her presence. In a scene with the Dame: “The old woman sat openly staring at Striker, this most exotic of creatures — a Black tourist on a high-end vacation.” Then the Dame asks, “Who did you hurt to get here?” Striker responds in shock, and the Dame matter-of-factly explains she was just asking about her flight from New York. “I said, How long was the flight to get here?”
This is a shrewd play on Barry’s part. Throughout the novel, Striker takes notice of the nasty, racist things directed at her by her fellow travelers. But how much of this is real, and how much of this is going on inside Striker? Barry has characters repeat themselves, but what they say isn’t the same as what Striker initially heard. Additionally, Striker seems to have brought some serious prescription medicine on the cruise with her, apparently for migraines. Considering this all together, our sense of Striker as a steady proxy wavers.
Barry introduces the driving drama of the plot early in the novel, when a small group of passengers, including Striker, leave the main ship for a day of kayaking. From the start, the excursion is full of portents: There’s gallows humor about getting lost in the bleak expanse, and about lingering ghosts and spirits; the number of people on the kayaking tour is an unlucky 13; and early on, an albatross flies into someone’s five-figure camera and dies, echoing the event that inspired Coleridge’s “Rime of the Ancient Mariner.”
Soon enough, a catastrophic accident kills the group’s affable guide and separates the kayakers from one another. I can’t tell you more, and not because I care about spoilers. Instead it’s because Barry redacts the next 11 pages, save for a couple of phrases here and there, like the dialogical pairing of “Look” and “do I have to.” Even in those instances, she leaves the speakers ominously unidentified.
It takes some time to understand the rationale for this and several other redactions. Is this a cop-out or the most faithful way of conveying what it’s like to find yourself in a confused and frightened state?
Barry, a professor of English at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, and a prolific multigenre writer, offers a literary signal of what she’s up to when she has two characters exchange admiring views on the American horror writer Shirley Jackson’s “The Lottery.” “You never find out where the town is or why they started stoning people once a year just for kicks,” one character says. “If you knew why they did it, it might not be so creepy,” the other responds. Like that great story, “The Unveiling” is a controlled exposure of a deeply unsettling situation that involves a small group of seemingly anodyne people in a strange and isolated setting who eventually turn on one another, viciously.
“The Unveiling” is an ambitious work of literary horror marked by bold storytelling moves. Barry’s execution is uneven — while being confused about what’s going on is a feature, not a bug, of the story, the cumulative impact of the novel’s redactions, fraught bewilderments and other obscuring effects will wear on even the most sympathetic reader’s patience. Still, it’s exhilarating to follow these terrified, terribly behaved characters as they try to survive with and against one another, while out there in the Antarctic dark, other presences lurk. Whether you reckon with it or avoid it, a supernatural present, like a traumatic past, will hunt and haunt you.
THE UNVEILING | By Quan Barry | Grove Press | 304 pp. | $28
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