Hello Kelley,
I wanted to let you know that I have read your novel Solitaire and loved it. I also wanted to let you know that I never would have, if Nicola had not been so effusive in her praise of it…I absolutely had to purchase it and am thoroughly pleased that I did so…it was an EXCELLENT read! It was vivid, alive, intriguing, captivating. I loved the concept, the depiction of the characters, I loved the flow of dialogue, the description of all that was tangible and not…absolutely lovely.
I have a question though, and I hope you don’t think it narrow-minded; it is not meant that way at all, I am truly curious. And perhaps someone has already asked this question, forgive me if that is the case…but: In light of the fact that Hong Kong is, shall we say, a major background, in the story, are Jackal, Snow (who sounds stunning) and the other characters Asian? I ask this because I don’t wish to fall into the trap of assuming all characters, in any book, are Caucasian.
Thanks so much for this. 🙂
Ciao.
~Rebecca~
Well, neither do I (smile), which is why I tried not to make whiteness the default value in the book. I visualize Ko as a true multinational corporation, a mix of people of many backgrounds bound together by the corporate metaculture. I think if you look again, you’ll find that Jackal is half Italian and half Spanish; Turtle and Jane are Hispanic; Bear, Crichton and Khofi Andabe are Black (I think of Bear as Afro-Caribbean and Andabe as African, but there are no specific clues to that). Tiger and Chao are Chinese. Estar is her deliberately indefinable self. Snow is as purely Norwegian as someone growing up in Asia can be. Scully is pretty generic Anglo-mutt. Neill is Australian, although you’d never know it from the book.
It doesn’t seem narrow-minded to me to question whether a white writer has considered that not everyone (and especially not everyone of importance) in her story is white. Quite the opposite. I think it’s good to read beyond majority-culture assumptions (all characters are white, straight, middle-class, Christian, physically unlimited, etc. unless otherwise labeled to identify their “difference from the norm”). And it’s good to write beyond these assumptions. But it’s not enough for a writer to go through her manuscript and hang a race tag on everyone. How stupid it would be to write a paragraph in the opening of Solitaire about Jackal looking for her web, “a racially diverse group of peers with a variety of cultural perspectives,” or some such crap. Especially if hanging the race tag is all the writer does. Creating characters who are essentially mainstream white folks in terms of worldview, experience, cultural assumptions and behavior, and then painting their skin a different color, does nothing to recognize diversity. It’s just bad writing. It takes more work to make people actually different from one another, particular in ways that reflect something about where they came from as well as who they are individually.
I’m not completely happy with the job I did in Solitaire in this regard, but the errors are those of execution, not imagination. And one reason I chose Hong Kong as the background for Ko, and Al Iskandariyah ( Alexandria) as the seat of world government, is that the world is edging toward a rebalance of power, in my opinion. If the people of the world will get off our asses and do something to help Africa, and if China builds a few more cultural and long-term economic bridges with other nations, then I think in thirty years it’s not going to be only white western superpowers driving the global cultural and political agenda. I think that will be a very scary time for many white westerners.
I’m glad you enjoyed the book and were willing to take a chance on it. But honestly, what would you expect Nicola to say (grin)–””My sweetie wrote a book and it sucks, don’t buy it”?
Cheers.