Symptomatic

Symptomatic

book data

128 ratings, 3.05 average rating, 29 reviews (more data...)

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published

February 1st 2005 by Riverhead Trade

binding

Paperback, 224 pages

isbn

1594480672 (isbn13: 9781594480676)

description

First time in paperback-the new novel from the acclaimed author of Caucasia.

McBride's The Color of Water" (Glamour)...more

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other reviews (showing 1-20 of 165)

All ratings | 5 stars (11) | 4 stars (26) | 3 stars (60) | 2 stars (20) | 1 star (11) | avg 3.05

all | this edition

Sara

Sara rated it:

04/20/07

i initially chose 2 stars, then thought about my initial review to jhumpa lahiri's "the namesake" and decided i didn't want to make the mistake again of comparing the second work by an author to the debut.

the first half showcases senna's strengths-- creating complicated characters who explore and explode race and racism. the second half wanders off and loses focus. but, even so, it's pretty good. i have to finish books i start reading, but if you are a person that doesn't have...more

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Laylo

Laylo rated it:

04/23/08

bookshelves: evocative

Read in April, 2008

At first, this seemed to be a casual stroll in the shoes of a woman subtly observing her experiene and interactions in our highly racialized modern society, a study uniquely complicated by her own physical ambiguity. But as I read on, I realized it was much deeper than that, that it was layered with meaning; contextual analysis that was so subtle it could be passed as poetic, and artfully constructed reflections, literal and figurative. The narrator's racial ambiguity gives her a very unique per...more

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Natlyn

Natlyn rated it:

02/10/08

Read in February, 2008

Senna does a wonderful job of capturing the thoughtless racial jibes and slurs to which those of visually indeterminate race are frequently subjected. However, while I think she is attempting to subvert the tragic mulatto stereotype, I'm not sure she does or rather I think she may have simply changed the manifestation of the tragic mulatto's condition. In any event, I'm not sure what I'm supposed to take away from this well written and crafted tale regarding how best to handle being of mixed rac...more

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Leslie

Leslie rated it:

04/04/07

Read in October, 2006

This book itself is symptomatic of the "sophomore slump" faced by many young writers coming off unbridled success of a debut novel. Unoriginal, uninspired, and unrewarding, Symptomatic is nothing but an amateur suspense novel posing as "literature" under the cloak of its author's mature writing style.

Danzy Senna received well-deserved critical acclaim for her debut novel, Caucasia. This fascinating coming-of-age narrative tells the tale of two mixed-race sisters, Birdie a...more This book itself is symptomatic of the "sophomore slump" faced by many young writers coming off unbridled success of a debut novel. Unoriginal, uninspired, and unrewarding, Symptomatic is nothing but an amateur suspense novel posing as "literature" under the cloak of its author's mature writing style.

Danzy Senna received well-deserved critical acclaim for her debut novel, Caucasia. This fascinating coming-of-age narrative tells the tale of two mixed-race sisters, Birdie and Cole, growing up in early 1970s Boston. Birdie, who looks white, is forced to go underground in the rural northeast with her white mother who has supposedly committed an activist-related crime, while Cole, who resembles her black father, heads to Brazil and ultimately Berekely, CA with him. This original narrative invokes profound questions about our society's attitude and perception of race.

Unfortunately, the only resemblence that Symptomatic has at all to its predecessor is its recycled ideas, both character-wise and politically. The unnammed narrator is a 20-something year old up and coming journalist, who writes for a prominent New York City magazine on a fellowship. She, too, like Birdie and Cole, has a mixed-race identity as well as Birdie's tenous and uncomfortable attitude about it. Her apathetic parents and brother live in Berkeley, CA (sound familiar?) and have a 1970s "hippie" attitude about life. Through various circumstances, she befriends another worker at the magazine, a middle-aged woman who has been somewhat ostracized by the rest of the staff. Gradually, the woman's approach to the friendship becomes more and more disturbing, until it finally reaches a frenzied peak that ends in violence, death, and a plot twist that any attuned reader will see coming a mile away.

While the plot itself wants to be a psychological thriller, the bulk of the prose is devoted to the narrator's [i.e. Senna's:] ruminations about race and class in society. When original, the narrator's commentary is ill-placed and directionless; when recycled from Caucasia, the commentary is poorly imitated and not fully articulated. One scene even uses an exact same game as Caucasia. In Caucasia, Birdie befriends a group of girls in New Hampshire who discuss what "season" Birdie should be in regards to clothing. Is she a winter, an autumn, a spring, or a summer? Symptomatic expands this discussion of season color-matching when the narrator's friend obsesses over the idea of "season" clothing matches to the point that she takes the narrator to a professional "colorist" who tells her that she is an autumn. This recycled storyline just makes the novel even less authentic than it already is.

The one thing that is somewhat redeeming about Symptomatic is its showcase of Senna's graceful writing style. The lucid quality of the narrator's perceptions lend credibility to even her weakest perceptions. Senna works well in first person, bestowing her narrators with keen eyes toward society that stem from a painful self-awareness of their own "outsider" vantage point. While Symptomatic is indeed burdened with its own sickness of banality, Senna's strong writing talent assures me that, thankfully, it is not a chronic condition....less

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Naj

Naj rated it:

(review of isbn 1573222755)

06/04/08

bookshelves: african-american-literature

Read in January, 2008

This book reminds me of a modern-day version of Passing (by Nella Larsen). Set in gritty New York during the 1990s, it focuses on the complicated relationship between two women of mixed race. Their relationship is as complex and duplicitous as the women themselves. Senna grasps the rawness of NYC and paints it as life in the city can be, not the fantasy often depicted (which I'm guilty of myself). I really respected that about this novel.

Some people I know found the ending predictable. Othe...more

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hannah

hannah rated it:

07/08/08

bookshelves: fiction-1951-present

Read in July, 2008

Whoa! This book took a surprising turn at the end that I did not expect at all. I enjoyed this novel even more than I enjoyed Senna's first novel, CAUCASIA. This one subtly dealt with issues of race and of being biracial in an excellent way, and it never overpowered the novel, which is great. Too often stories about mixed-race people insist on being about being mixed-race, as if being biracial means that that is your only issue in life. This one was still about a young woman struggling to find h...more

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Micole

Micole rated it:

10/08/07

bookshelves: -brooklyn, mystery, noir-female, race

Read in October, 2007

Nameless mixed-race narrator is befriended by and then stalked by another mixed-race woman who sees this as an essential kinship.

"She opened the door, but paused, and turned to smile at me through a web of rain. 'You know, you're never really alone. Not really.'

"I looked down and kicked the pavement. I hadn't known I was that obvious."

New York as winter incarnate; a place of exile. Undercover sister. Race as obsession and trap. Racial identity placed at the center ...more

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Micah

Micah rated it:

04/15/07

Read in June, 2005

recommends it for: everyone

The inside flap of Senna's Symptomatic describes the book as "haunting" and I agree with that description. Years after reading this book, the ending still haunts me. I'm not a big fan of mystery or horror novels and this is truly neither -- the pain the reader is exposed to is more raw and psychological than graphic and physical (though there is just a touch of that as well). I had a hard time getting through Senna's much more widely acclaimed Caucasia but couldn't put ...more

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fletch

fletch rated it:

(review of isbn 1573222755)

11/15/07

Read in November, 2007

Maybe I just had lower standards for quality fiction back in college, but I remember really enjoying Senna's first novel. The argument made by the grad student who was teaching the class was that Senna offered a character that defied traditional images of mixed race women - the tragic mulatta figure who always self-destructs by the end of the novel because both worlds reject her. Well, she's in this book... the story is weird and convoluted, and not in a good way.

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Shawna

Shawna rated it:

03/25/08

Classic plot along the lines of The Bell Jar or A Tree Grows in Brooklyn of a young woman moving to New York City to make it in the journalism world...a little played out but still appealing. The main character and narrator's descriptions of what she's thinking about and what is going on around her were interesting and easy to relate to for me. And there's a plot twist at the end!

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Liana

Liana rated it:

06/29/08

This book was structurally exquisite. Even though Caucasia is more well-known and has more interesting political/ historical tidbits, Symptomatic is more complex and mature. It reminded me of Conrad's The Secret Sharer: a choreographed literary dance as the unnamed protagonist painfully slowly comes to recognize elements of her possible future self in her doppelganger.

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Sassacaia

Sassacaia rated it:

07/21/07

Read in May, 2005

I loved this book instantly. Loved the author's style and the fast pace of the writing. I even loved the way the page numbers were printed.
I got further into the story and got slightly disconnected from it because it was about racial situations I can't relate to. But it picked up and went in a direction I never would have imagined and I couldn't put it down.

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Kat

Kat rated it:

09/07/07

Read in September, 2007

I really loved Caucasia. I heard her read from the novel she's currently working on and I loved it too—but this piece read a little like genre fiction, and the dialogue was simplistic and unnatural at once. Oh well. It was a quick read.

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Stephanie A.

Stephanie A. rated it:

05/01/08

Read in January, 2007

Quick, smoothly-plotted thriller about a young multiracial woman who, at the height of her loneliness, mistakenly befriends an obsessive older woman who happens to have the same racial background. Recommended.

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Brigitte

Brigitte rated it:

(review of isbn 1573222755)

10/08/07

Read in January, 2004

This book was so disappointing that I like to pretend that Danzy Senna didn't really write it. It reads like the movie "Single White Female" only the main character is mixed and the story isn't as entertaining.

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rachel

rachel rated it:

02/22/07

Read in February, 2007

although slightly frenetic at times, this was a really good book.
i didn't love it quite as much as the other book I read by this author, but it was very good.

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Katie

Katie rated it:

11/28/07

I tore through this book in a day. It's very noir, psychological, creepy and tense. Read it if you like a gnawing feeling of impending doom.

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Arrienne

Arrienne rated it:

04/27/08

this book was a little strange to me. i probably need to read it again to get it. didn't like as much as her first novel.

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Alyssa

Alyssa rated it:

08/30/07

It was awesome at first and then it turned into a bad cover of Nella Larsen's Passing and got very convoluted.

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Tasha

Tasha rated it:

10/29/07

bookshelves: african-american

I borrowed this book from a friend. It was a good read. Not as good as Caucasia, but still recommended.

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