review - the untelling

“The Untelling”
Tayari Jones
(Warner Books)

Ariadne Jackson was saddled with her name by a mother who never wanted her children to be underestimated. “That is not what Dr. King died for,” was a mantra that Aria grew up hearing. At 25, Aria feels that she still hasn’t grown into her name. She lives with her best friend Rochelle in an Atlanta neighborhood filled with crackheads and thieves, including her neighbor Cynthia, a drug addict with whom Aria has struck up a tentative friendship. Even her precarious home is a choice she’s satisfied with, as the slowly gentrifying area offers Aria a certain kind of comfort: “I like the idea of imminent transformation and appreciation.” Her life seems fulfilling on the surface: a college degree, a supportive boyfriend, and a job teaching literacy to GED candidates.

But Aria’s life was marred when, as a child, her father and baby sister were killed in a car accident as the family drove to Aria’s dance recital; Aria’s father slowly died as she sat in the backseat. Afterwards, she was left behind with a mother who baked BB’s into cornbread out of spite, and a sister who was so desperate to escape that, at eighteen, she married a man who was once her father’s best friend. The guilt of watching her father die is a memory she hasn’t been able to recover from, something that has estranged her from her family for years. When Aria believes she is pregnant, it gives her the opportunity to reconnect with her mother and sister, and when she discovers her symptoms are not those of pregnancy, the new connection results in a surprising revelation that allows years of grief and guilt to surface, giving Aria new insight into her mother’s emotional plight – and her own.

Jones is undeniably talented, infusing Aria with a voice as strong as a song. The plot drives through the powerful emotional territory of cultural and sexual heritage, gripping the reader with beautiful language and imagery and pulling them through a tale that is carefully crafted and deliberate. Every page of “The Untelling” seems to insist that it is not just a book, it is literature, with hidden meaning throughout. But at the same time, this adherence to metaphor causes the book’s only flaw. All of the people in Aria’s world have been created with what on the surface appear to be meticulous human complexities, yet despite this many seem to exist only as mirrors for Aria’s current state – student Keisha’s swelling belly, Rochelle’s prematurely grey hair, Cynthia’s single-minded quest to find her lost crack rock - and few characters beyond Aria get to show their apparent depth. In a first person narrative, this technique emphasizes Aria’s own limited viewpoint, the detachment she’s felt from the world around her, yet it also makes the novel almost too one-sided, skimming the surface of what might have been.