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.
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