My Year of Meats

#140
Title: My Year of Meats
Author: Ruth L. Ozeki
Publisher: Penguin
Year: 1998
Genre: fiction
 384 pages 

It's a little hard to know whether this is an excellent novel with horrific content, or an excellent novel that becomes somewhat disappointing over the course of the story. I tend toward the former interpretation, but some reviewers seem to agree with the latter. Specifically, the novel veers toward pedantic nonfiction documentary toward the end; since the protagonist is making a documentary, this does not trouble me. I'm a little more concerned by the sometimes heavy-handed parallelism between documentarian Jane and important secondary character Akiko. They begin more as foils, but end in some ways as reflections. I'd have liked to see more divergence between them by the end. It's stated, but not adequately conveyed.

Both the novel and negative reviews of the novel evoke comparisons to Kingsolver's Prodigal Summer and Smiley's Moo (indeed, the included reader's guide quotes Smiley's comments about the book). The novel itself involves women finding their place and power, and learning to articulate their beliefs and values, and act on them, with reasonable confidence. Like Moo, the story begins innocently and somewhat farcically, then moves gradually toward more serious revelations with bigger consequences and higher stakes. As in Prodigal Summer, the characters must wrestle with their growing awareness that, hopeless as it may seem, they must act in accord with the dictates of conscience in order not to stand by passively when damage is being done.

All three novels have a reasonably strong anti-chemical agricultural message. All have evoked angry reviews that state that the author (and protagonist) is some sort of unreasonable smug feminist who thinks women (and in this case, also lesbians) and nature are great and that men and American culture are bad--the twist in reviews of My Year of Meats is the charge that Ozeki valorizes white Americans and denigrates Japan. Sorry, I don't see it the way these readers see it. Positive depictions of lesbians and negative depictions of American agricultural practices do not trouble me overmuch. In fact, I see positive and negative depictions of both males and females in all of these novels, and I'm not sure what has some reviewers so up in arms. If I were to count up all the books I've read in which women are shrill and useless and American men save the day, I'd have to say they far outnumber the novels that depict the opposite. Each of these stories doesn't quite trust that the reader will put the pieces together, and so is unnecessarily emphatic and unsubtle. I can live with that.