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I had not expected The Kid to be so difficult to get through. I was drawn to this book because I appreciate Sapphire's drawing attention to a world so many people refuse to think about -- a world of extreme poverty, children no one wants, trapped in a nightmarish foster care system.
When I was teaching at an urban community college I tended to avoid assigning books which focused on such grim material. When Sapphire’s first novel, Push, came out I read the reviews, and briefly considered it, but decided for some of my students it would hit too close to home and for others I feared would reinforce their racial prejudices and stereotypes.
I never read Push, never saw the movie it inspired, so The Kid has been my introduction to Sapphire. She is clearly a talented writer, but her skills as writer were not enough to enable me to deal with the subject matter: graphic descriptions of the sexual abuse of children, the victim becoming an abuser of younger, more vulnerable children, the constant barrage of four letter words. Just too much to endure. If I had not contracted to review this book, I’m sure I would never have finished it.
There are writers who deal with painful material, but the beauty of their language mitigates the pain -- Toni Morrison’s The Bluest Eye and Beloved, Shakespeare’s King Lear. Sapphire is a very talented writer but in her case the power of the language does not mitigate the pain.
In Morrison’s fiction, the narrative voice is usually a sympathetic one and there are usually a range of voices. In The Kid, for the most part, there is one voice -- the angry, disturbed voice of Abdul Jones. I am sure there are internal echoes and structural symmetries in the book I did not catch -- I was so eager to be done with that disturbing voice.
Yet despite my eagerness to be done with the book, it has stayed with me -- no doubt a testament to the power of Sapphire's writing.
