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Summary
Summary
Kathleen Winter's luminous debut novel is a deeply affecting portrait of life in an enchanting seaside town and the trials of growing up unique in a restrictive environment.
In 1968, into the devastating, spare atmosphere of the remote coastal town of Labrador, Canada, a child is born: a baby who appears to be neither fully boy nor fully girl, but both at once. Only three people are privy to the secret--the baby's parents, Jacinta and Treadway, and a trusted neighbor and midwife, Thomasina. Though Treadway makes the difficult decision to raise the child as a boy named Wayne, the women continue to quietly nurture the boy's female side. And as Wayne grows into adulthood within the hyper-masculine hunting society of his father, his shadow-self, a girl he thinks of as "Annabel," is never entirely extinguished.
Kathleen Winter has crafted a literary gem about the urge to unveil mysterious truth in a culture that shuns contradiction, and the body's insistence on coming home. A daringly unusual debut full of unforgettable beauty, Annabel introduces a remarkable new voice to American readers.
Author Notes
Kathleen Winter's Annabel was a New York Times Editors' Choice, short-listed for The Orange Prize for Fiction, and a finalist for all three of Canada's major literary awards: The Scotiabank Giller Prize, Rogers Writers' Trust Fiction Prize, and Governor General's Literary Award for Fiction. Her first collection of short stories, boYs , was the winner of both the Winterset Award and the 2006 Metcalf-Rooke Award. A long-time resident of St. John's, Newfoundland, Winter now lives in Montreal.
Visit her blog at kathleenwinter.livejournal.com
Reviews (4)
Publisher's Weekly Review
Isolated as Croyden Harbour may be from the social upheaval of 1968, the tiny village on the southeast Labrador coast plays host to its own revolution in Winter's sincere, self-serious debut. Jacinta and Treadway Blake are like any other couple in town-he's away on the trapline all winter, she's confined to domestic life. But the clarity of traditional gender roles begins to unravel when Jacinta gives birth to a hermaphrodite. Both Treadway and the local doctor decide the baby will be brought up as a boy-he's named Wayne, and his female genitalia are sewn shut. Meanwhile, Jacinta's friend Thomasina, quietly tends to the spiritual development of the child's female identity. Kept in the dark about his condition for most of his childhood, Wayne struggles to live up to the manly standards imposed by his well-meaning if curmudgeonly father, but when adolescence rolls around, Wayne's body reveals a number of surprises and becomes a battleground of physiology, identity, and sexual discovery. Though delivered at times with a heavy hand, the novel's moral of acceptance and understanding is sure to win Winter many fans. (Jan.) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.
Booklist Review
Wayne, born into the harsh, rural landscape of Labrador, Canada, in 1968, is a hermaphrodite. It is his father who ultimately decides to raise him as a male and names him. Only Wayne's parents and their friend Thomasina Baikie, also present at his birth, are aware of his gender duality. The two women silently battle against Wayne's father's gender assignment, and as Wayne grows older, he must contend with the two genders struggling for dominance within him. His father, Treadway, a trapper who spends most of his time outdoors, works hard to steer Wayne away from his feminine side. His mother, Jacinta, becomes increasingly estranged from her husband as she mourns the loss of her female child. Following the tragic death of her husband and daughter, Thomasina travels the world and sends enticing postcards to Wayne of the world beyond his own. A simple yet eloquent coming-of-age tale, this debut novel quietly questions our assumptions about gender by presenting us with a host of complex, evocative characters. A fantastic read that will appeal to fans of Jeffrey Eugenides' Middlesex (2002).--Hunt, Julie Copyright 2010 Booklist
New York Review of Books Review
SEEING double isn't all that easy, especially when it comes to questions of gender and sexuality. In her excellent study "Vice Versa," Marjorie Garber argues that bisexuality isn't a third category but a category that undoes identity categories, and that sexuality itself is "a narrative that changes over time rather than a fixed identity, however complex." In her memoir "Conundrum," Jan Morris, who was James Morris before a sex-change operation in 1972, writes: "I do not mind my continuing ambiguity. ... I see myself not as man or woman, self or other, fragment or whole." She concludes her autobiography not with a "solution," but with a question: "What if I remain an equivocal figure?" Indeed, what if? Gender has a funny way of multiplying, refracting, shifting into myriad shapes and configurations. These days, more than a few people custom-mix their identities through hormones and surgery. There aren't only two or three or even four genders, but as many as can be imagined, and they can change over time. Fluidity isn't a rallying cry, but a fact of modern life. Fiction that attempts to contemplate this state of affairs is still rare, although the success of Jeffrey Eugenides's "Middlesex" suggests that the plasticity of gender touches a nerve in many readers. Still, the same multiplicity that offers so much to the writer also comes with obstacles. Sexual politics, medicine and sociology press hard on the subject, all bearing claims and arguments. A transgender or intersex character may open up many possibilities, but narrative is often anxious for closure, and so are readers. Moreover, and perhaps toughest to manage, is the hunger to decide what gender means and the concomitant insistence that it must mean something. We like to think of gender as a noun; we have a hard time understanding that it can be a verb as well. All of which is a long way round of saying that Kathleen Winter's first novel, "Annabel" - a No. 1 best seller in Canada - is absorbing, earnest and in many respects quite beautifully written, but as often as it tries to fly into the open space that gender ambiguity creates, it is pulled back by convictions and assumptions that contradict, and deaden, its richer aspirations. Gender and desire want to ramble, but Winter dutifully presses them into the service of a feminist parable, depriving her story of much of its anarchic, unpredictable force. The hero/ine of "Annabel" is Wayne Blake, an intersexual born to a working-class couple on the Labrador coast in 1968. Wayne is born with an undersize penis, one testicle and a vagina. In accordance with the conventions of the time, the infant is surgically rendered "male" by doctors who sew up the vagina and begin a regimen of androgenizing hormones. Everyone agrees never to tell Wayne what he had when he was born. Wayne's father, in particular, is desperate for his child to be a "real boy," while Wayne's mother begins a lifetime of secretly nurturing the girl in him, haunted by the feeling that she has "murdered" her own daughter. Complicating matters is the fact that the community into which Wayne is born is one of rigid conformity and outright sexism, where men are "kings outside their houses" and women "queens of inner rooms and painted sills . . . and carpet cleaners." Men hunt, fish, trap, build things and are mostly really bad in bed; women marry young, have babies, suffer quietly and long inchoately for more. Wayne's secret vagina, obviously, would be a scandal in a place like this, and his father is determined to make sure the girl in his son doesn't show. However, unlike many of the women in Labrador, the girl in Wayne cannot be suppressed. Eventually she announces her existence, upending his life and leading him to claim his inner Annabel (the name given him by his mother's freethinking best friend, Thomasina), and she appears to be a fully formed character in her own right, like an internal twin. As Wayne begins to make demands to free his vagina, "Annabel, inside Wayne, . . . heard it from her hiding place." Winter clearly loves all her characters, even the hopelessly misguided men, and she lavishes compassion and metaphor on them. But she seems to feel that they, and we, are greatly in need of instruction. After a moment of rebellion on Wayne's part, we are told: "When the child separates from its parents to explore the new world, the parents can do one of two things. They can fight it with rules. . . . Or they can admit the new world exists." No kidding. Or, "People will notice when a neighbor is not herself, but for a long time they will not intervene." Reform trumps exploration every time; a very basic feminism smothers surprise. No one gets to explore the mystery of desire or head down the corridors of polymorphous pleasure - they all have serious work to do for the greater social good. Wayne, double-gendered emblem of the suppression of women in Labrador, duly claims his better half, escapes his hometown, gets beaten up and redeems the gender politics of his father, who is then allowed a modest moment of grace. Boston, site of freedom and the future to Wayne, is populated by young people "who wore no makeup and had a plain beauty that was made of insight and intelligence and did not have a gender." Chacun à son goût, I guess, but is that all hermaphroditism can imagine? Couldn't it be, for instance, not the erasure of gender, but the proliferation of it? Winter is, moreover, working from the same binary model she is purporting to overturn: the idea that Annabel is a "girl" - and that this means someone softer, sweeter, gentler, more emotional - is a given here. But what if the inner Annabel were a little butch? Or what if she changed from day to day? Or what if she and Wayne were less distinguishable from each other? What if it wasn't Wayne's job to save the world from the oppression of women, but to tell some other story altogether? By which I suppose I mean: What if Wayne wasn't a symbol of freedom but was, in fact, free to be a character? Perhaps it seems churlish to ask for more from a novel that means so well and works so hard. But if it had worked less hard, it might not have contained its fertile interest in ambiguity in so confining a girdle of convictions. That they are convictions with which many of us would probably agree - the liberation of married, heterosexual women in small towns is a good thing, the mutilation of intersex infants in the name of "normalcy" is a bad thing - doesn't change the fact that Winter's preoccupation with them has left the imagination, and her potentially complex hero/ine, without much room to roam in these ostensibly liberating pages. The hero/ine is Wayne Blake, a hermaphrodite born to a working-class couple on the Labrador coast in 1968. Stacey D'Erasmo's most recent novel is "The Sky Below."
Library Journal Review
Winter's first novel tells the story of an intersex child born in the late 1960s in a small, rural town in Canada and raised as a boy. His parents try to protect Wayne from harm, each in his or her own way; his father tries to interest him in the wilderness skills that men in their community use to make a living, but his mother refuses to discourage his interest in more feminine pursuits. Wayne doesn't learn of his intersexuality until a medical emergency reveals his condition to him. Though he tries to be a boy to fit in, he is preoccupied by the girl that he knows lives within him; he has to leave home and quit his hormone therapy to allow his body to be as ambiguous as he feels inside. Winter's lyrical language contrasts with the characters' discomfort about Wayne's secret. VERDICT Readers interested in literary explorations of gender, such as Jeffrey Eugenides's Middlesex, will appreciate this novel as well. [See Prepub Alert, LJ 9/1/10.]-Amy Ford, St. Mary¿s Cty. Lib., Lexington Park, MD (c) Copyright 2010. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.