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Darren, the eldest, flies in from America, where he is a
successful journalist, still choked with anger at his father and
already on his third wife. Shirley has been left a wealthy widow
by her Ghanaian husband — a marriage that caused almost as
much familial strife as her current relationship with Leroy, a
black social worker — but swaddled in cashmere and silks, she
bears a sadness all her own.
As a teenager,
Shirley sensed a sexual sting in her father's punches, and this
has taken root in Dirk, the skin-headed baby of the family.
Brutalised and repressed, he desperately seeks acceptance as
well as scapegoats in the company of loutish BNP-types. By the
end of the novel, Dirk's inarticulate hatred of 'coloureds' will
have coupled with his latent homosexuality to bloody effect,
spurring Alfred to perform one final, redemptive act of duty.
The White
Family is a worthwhile novel, but Gee's skilful structure and
tender, precise prose are undermined by riffs on pop psychology:
as Alfred realises that the 'enemy' is no more than a bunch of
'giant teenagers', his eyes are opened to their exoticism and
the 'gleaming black' of their skin.
Gee is unflinching in her
exploration of the causes and consequences of racism, but too
often she delves beneath the skin of her archetypes to come up
with near stereotypes, and for all that it aims at
up-to-the-minute, the book remains curiously, naïvely dated. As
White Teeth, that other multi-cultural Brent novel showed,
today's racial landscape is coloured less in blacks and whites
than myriad shades of grey. (The Observer)
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