Review: Elaine Blair on Oyinkan Braithwaite
Ayoola has killed her boyfriend—again. This is the third time, and criminal classifications, like folk tales, follow the law of threes: with this third murder Ayoola is technically a serial killer, though the police have yet to catch on to her. She once again calls Korede, her long-suffering sister, to help clean up the mess.
My Sister, the Serial Killer, Oyinkan Braithwaite’s debut novel, has a pulpy title but a plot worthy of classical drama—though if it were a play we wouldn’t have the pleasure of Korede’s deadpan narration. Ayoola is beautiful, Korede is ordinary. Even if Ayoola were arrested, Korede thinks, “she would probably convince the court that she was innocent. Her actions were the fault of her victims and she had acted as any reasonable, gorgeous person would under the circumstances.”
The sisters’ faces have shaped their complex fates in their home city of Lagos, Nigeria. When Ayoola was a child her abusive father nearly promised her in marriage to an old village chief to further a business opportunity. Now that their father is dead and the sisters are independent, Ayoola’s looks win her endless dates, jewelry, fancy dinners, and flower deliveries. Korede—she’s promoted to head nurse in recognition of her conscientious work at a hospital. It’s this work that makes her such an effective accessory to her sister’s murders. She knows how and where to apply bleach when Ayoola calls for help with a corpse that used to be a man named Femi.
“I could make out his sculpted body beneath his white tee,” Korede tells us. “He looked like a man who could survive a couple of flesh wounds, but then so had Achillles and Casesar. It was a shame to think that death would whittle away at his broad shoulders and concave abs, until he was nothing more than bone.” A pity, yes.
Korede’s hard-boiled elegy to Femi’s abs is part of her thrilling moral ambiguity. She has been fiercely loyal to her sister since childhood, we learn, even though Ayoola has always gotten a much larger share of their mother’s love and men’s interest. She has kept her sister’s secret and not looked too deeply into her flimsy claims of self-defense. But after this third corpse Korede starts to have doubts. From his blog Femi seems like he was a nice guy. He wrote a poem that Korede can’t get out of her mind. His sister is beside herself. And how can Ayoola go on blithely doing her usual things—promoting her clothing line on social media, dancing to Whitney Houston, going on more dates, posting a cold-blooded condolence for Femi, and treating her sister like a nag whenever she brings up Ayoola’s little problem? When Ayoola starts dating a doctor at Korede’s hospital whom Korede has had a crush on for ages, Korede’s loyalty is strained. What if the doctor, Tade, becomes Ayoola’s fourth victim? Should she … warn him?
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Even while the pages practically turn themselves, My Sister, the Serial Killer poses remarkably subtle psychological questions about Korede. Is she having a moral awakening, or is it, less nobly, more of an erotic awakening, motivated by her desire for Tade (or maybe even Femi)? And is it possible that the higher path is in fact to help her sister?
For it’s clear that Korede and Ayoola together have to negotiate a world of socially powerful and potentially violent men, as Braithwaite painstakingly shows, whether bribe-seeking traffic cops, abusive fathers, leering elders, or beauty-blinded rich swains, and that this context torques all potential moral questions. As the flippant title practically acknowledges, it’s unusual in real life for women to be serial killers or to kill their romantic partners, while it is alarmingly common for men in many parts of the world (including both Nigeria and the United States) to murder their girlfriends. You couldn’t transpose this narrative onto a pair of fictional brothers—a woman-murderer and his reluctant accomplice—and arrive at the same subtle moral questions. Who would have patience for the brother who dithered about whether or not he should warn the next potential mark? Which leaves readers with a final, unsettling puzzle: does our knowledge of injustice make this fictional male bloodletting more enjoyable? Does it make absolute wrongs seem a tiny bit relative? Do we too feel that wanton murder is not quite as bad when Ayoola is doing it?
Elaine Blair is a critic whose work has appeared in The New York Review of Books, Harper’s, The New Yorker, and other journals.
Book News (new feature!)
Big news this week on the prize front! The National Book Awards announced their 2019 “long lists” for their five annual prizes (fiction, nonfiction, poetry, translation, children’s books) to be awarded in early October. The NBA has been hailed in recent years for widening the lens of recognized books, opening up to translations and books by writers not always acknowledged by the establishment. The MacArthur Foundation also announced its coveted “genius grants,” which this year went to writers Valeria Luiselli, Ocean Vuong, and Emily Wilson; scholars Elizabeth Anderson, Danielle Citron, Saidiya Hartman, Kelly Lytle Hernández, and Jeffrey Alan Miller; and cartoonist Lynda Barry, among others. Margaret Atwood’s brand-new sequel to her dystopian novel (and celebrated HULU adaptee) The Handmaid’s Tale, called The Testaments, remains atop the Indie Bound independent booksellers’ bestseller list for fiction; a new book by Malcolm Gladwell, which blurs the audio-biblio line with his popular podcast, Revisionist History, tops nonfiction.
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Coming soon: Hugh Eakin on Gertrude Stein, barnstormer; Edward Mendelson on the history of print.
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