Book Review: New Fiction From Nicole Cuffy and More

Nicole Cuffy’s DANCES (One World, 277 pp., $27) follows 22-year-old Cece Cordell as she becomes the first Black female principal dancer for New York City Ballet, a long-held dream that is occasionally frustrated by the self-doubt she suffers beneath one of the dance world’s brightest spotlights. The people she loves aren’t much help: Her boyfriend and dance partner blows hot and cold as her best friend abandons her for a new romance. Her mother, Cece narrates, “told us that following your dreams is for white people,” and her father has long stayed out of the picture. Growing up, only her older brother, Paul, supported Cece unreservedly; but Paul struggles with addiction, and has been missing for years.

Cece’s anxieties mount after the founder of a rival dance company tries to poach her, just as her own (white) director, Kaz, writes a ballet for her to star in that he hopes will bring “the African American oral tradition to the stage, canonizing it as the old stories of Russian peasants have been canonized.” Except Cece thinks the new ballet exploits her Blackness. “Every time I begin to feel at home in this company,” she laments, “I am reminded of my own otherness.”

Cuffy’s novel transcends familiar narratives about the fraught journey toward artistic distinction by exploring the toll of reaching the end of such a journey, of being named a “first” in a given field. Cece believes she has neither the physical grace nor the beauty epitomized by the white dancers in her company. As a younger dancer at the School of American Ballet, she recalls, “I stood out because of my Blackness, and I was determined then to obliterate it, to render my Blackness irrelevant with perfection.”

When a crisis between Cece and her boyfriend breaches her emotional dam, Kaz insists she take time off. When a visit to her mother reveals Paul’s whereabouts, she sets off to find him and recover her sense of self.

Cuffy skillfully places readers within the dancer’s body as teachers prod Cece’s muscles until they reach bone, and as she pushes herself beyond her physical limits. Through longer passages about dance that may overwhelm the layperson, Cuffy effectively externalizes the inner disfigurement of a woman unable to receive genuine affection, least of all from herself.

The horrors of apartheid traumatize bodies and souls in Magogodi oaMphela Makhene’s INNARDS (Norton, 208 pp., $27.95), a gut punch of a collection tracking the intersecting lives of townsfolk in Soweto, South Africa, where white residents are “so rich they throw away meat,” and Black residents have spotty electricity when they have it at all.

Approaching her sometimes disturbing subject matter without kid gloves, Makhene brings together interlocking narratives that astonish as they reveal how malignant political forces can both ravage and vitalize the human spirit.

“Indians Can’t Fly” opens with the violent interrogation of an Indian woman whose husband has been disappeared. The police want to know where he is, as does she, though it soon becomes clear he may have turned against his fellow revolutionaries to work with a pro-apartheid branch of the police. Makhene’s wrenching prose renders the anguish of a wife fearing her loved one’s fate: “She carried that worry like a woman with child.”

In “Black Christmas,” a schoolgirl falls mute after coming across the burning corpse of a man who’s been bound to a preschool fence and set afire. Though she fantasizes a future as a rich woman with a house, an icebox and a bed she doesn’t have to share, her dreams, like her Christmas, are disrupted by the violence outside her door and the lingering smell of burning flesh, like “pig meat with salt and rot and iron.”

Makhene’s sensory details tend toward the gruesome: The sun turns skin “rancid”; a roast chicken’s “succulent innards” are “deboned”; bodies are welted by rubber hoses; dead dogs “disintegrate” in streets; even a bed’s “gut” is “stabbed” open. This catalog of brutality mirrors the figurative and literal evisceration of a population by colonialism.

Nowhere is this truer than in the titular story, which follows the news of a father’s death as it travels across the globe to his children. As his body decays into dirt, Makhene writes, “wormy innards butcher him into feast and fattening,” a grisly allegory for the exploitation of apartheid.

The Demilitarized Zone between North and South Korea provides the backdrop for the linked stories in Mirinae Lee’s 8 LIVES OF A CENTURY-OLD TRICKSTER (Harper, 290 pp., $30). Mook Miran, an enigmatic, 100-year-old nursing home resident, claims to have been, at various points in her long life — which encompassed two wars and some of the most tumultuous years in modern Korean history — a “Slave. Escape-artist. Murderer. Terrorist. Spy. Lover. And Mother.” Lee’s enthralling book depicts Mook during each of these incarnations, from her escape from a North Korean village to a married life her restive spirit never quite settles into.

“When I Stopped Eating Earth” finds Mook as a daughter with an alcoholic father, a refined but abused mother, and a “pure urge” to eat soil that she compares to the body’s need for water. Mook takes matters into her own hands after her “monster” father beats her mother unconscious, which sets Mook on a path toward an extraordinary life.

In “Storyteller,” she is a comfort woman for Japanese soldiers during World War II, surviving unfathomable violence by learning to shape-shift and weave fanciful tales. Like Cuffy and Makhene, Lee never shies from her characters’ suffering, even as she delivers something like salvation. “A daily life wallowing in misery sometimes made you find beauty in the least expected crevice,” Mook says of her rare glimpses of the “delightful mundanity” of regular people’s lives outside the military base.

In less capable hands, Mook’s deceptiveness as a narrator and the presentation of her life out of chronological order could be disorienting, but Lee drops the right details throughout to reinforce the connections among the stories. While Mook’s adventures in espionage feel a tad less engrossing than her more intimate dramas, Lee keeps readers hooked by expanding Mook’s universe with yarns from other family members, including Mook’s adopted daughter and son-in-law, who grieve their disintegrating relationship in “Confessions of an Ordinary Marriage.”

The captivating “Me, Myself, and Mole,” about a man who reunites with a woman who may or may not be his long-lost wife, highlights perhaps the collection’s most tantalizing trick: keeping readers guessing what’s real.

Laura Warrell is the author of “Sweet, Soft, Plenty Rhythm.”