Primitive People

Francine Prose’s Primitive People cuts the reader with all of its all sharp angles and razor edges, drawing blood with each new sentence, each new word. Described as a comedy of manners, the story follows Simone, a Haitian native, as she immigrates illegally into the United States and takes a job as a nanny for two confused and disturbed children. Desperate to fit in, Simone dissects each encounter and experience of her new life in hopes of deciphering the secret codes of a completely foreign culture. But what she finds is a more chaotic and dangerous landscape than the native land she escaped; a place of emotional and psychological violence where every word and deed seems designed to wound. Obsessed with carving sculptures of show more distended and grotesque tribal figures, the mother of Simone’s two charges decompensates towards madness a little more each day. The two children float through their days, their psyches disintegrating. And the rest of the town slices through life, scalpel sharp in their intentions to manipulate and destroy each other.

Prose may well have intended a pointed satire of an economically wealthy but morally bankrupt and emotionally rudderless class of people, but the bilious characters oozing off the page overpower any possible message. Without any redeemable human qualities, the tiresome characters wobble about, one-dimensional and stereotypical, incapable of stirring any emotion but contempt. Simone, surely created by Prose as the humane, caring soul of the story, never reaches beyond her own bewilderment, apparently clinging to the hope of gaining understanding and, eventually, admission into the venomous tribe.

What saves the novel from a lower rating is Prose’s fine writing. If you are able to read simply for the joy of well written prose, this Prose is not completely lost. Although, I enjoyed Bigfoot Dreams, a more soulful, captivating story, much more.

3 bones!!! show less

Somewhat funny story of a Haitian immigrant working as a nanny for a kooky, wealthy family living in the "country" outside NYC. As the family fractures, the nanny's outsider point of view points up the foibles of these privileged but miserable Americans. The family's pretenses and flaws are overly obvious, but the nanny's perspective is sometimes insightful. Like an updated (but much sharper and less lyrical) John Cheever tale.

This book was fairly tedious and found humor in people who had major problems, something that does not amuse me. Of course the woman who had lived a very difficult life and had very little material sustenance was the person who best understood life and its circumstances. It was truly a book of despair that did not appeal to me.