YA or STFU

This Full House, by Virginia Euwer Wolff

Wolff, Virginia Euwer (2009). This Full House. NY: Bowen Press (Harper Teen). 476 pages.

This book is the novel-in-verse conclusion to Wolff’s “Make Lemonade” trilogy of books, begun sometime around 1993. The books follow teenaged LaVaughn, who, in the first novel, begins a relationship with an unwed mother and, as the series progresses, supports this young woman and her children, falls in love with a male friend she is unaware is gay, and works to succeed in her underfunded school.

When I read the first book, Make Lemonade, around 1999, I was impressed by its unwillingness to address assumptions and issues regarding race in its narrative. Though the literary text–the narrative itself and the details of the characters and their situations–seemed encoded in a way that would encourage its decoding as a book about a character of color, the author (and her narrator) remains silent about the characters’ races and, as such, encourages us to think about issues of class and how these have been historically aligned with race. When I thought more about it, and when I talked to one of my colleagues, I started to wonder if this strategy wasn’t a kind of cop-out, a refusal to address a key issue that, no matter what we might believe, would definitely impact the lives of the characters as it does the lives of real people outside of the book. Furthermore, that Wolff encodes the narrative as “Black” by way of the use of non-white names (LaVaughn, for example) and vernacular associated with Black speech, makes the technique feel less like an attempt to question the importance of race and more like a colonial effort. As my colleague mentioned, too, the novels’ emphasis on pulling oneself up by one’s bootstraps (via a Good Education) seems to be one that ignores both contemporary and historical experiences of racial discrimination and that puts the blame on people of color for not reconciling their fates within the dominant culture already.

At any rate, This Full House follow LaVaughn as she begins a special science program for girls at a local university hospital. The program, called Women In Medical Science, is run by Dr. Moore, a woman who “believes girls in this city can make it into medicine/if they get some actual support from somewhere–/like she didn’t have any of./She had to push her way past the barriers/and she believes it shouldn’t be that way” (p. 81). Reading that quote, I thought, “At last, the novel is going to really start talking about race and expose the contradictions of the previous two volumes.” Unfortunately, the only (and I use this world facetiously) barrier Dr. Moore encountered (that is mentioned in the text at least) was related to her sex, not to her color. And, while this might be true enough–God knows women have been discouraged to pursue careers in the sciences long enough–it doesn’t quite ring true in the timeline of the story, which would put Dr. Moore in medical school in the early 1980s. And yes, I know, we’ve made tremendous strides since then, but come on, man!

I guess my problem is that I want this series to address what it seems reluctant to confront: the issue of racial inequality and its perpetual affect on people of color in terms of both historical and contemporary opportunity and access to services. And, while the topic of the books–in broad terms–does not make the series a “Black issues” series by default, Wolff’s effort to encode it as such combined with her unwillingness to address this makes me uncomfortable.