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Deep North
novel of racial identity in 1960s Boston
- GenresFiction
150 pages, Hardcover
First published March 28, 1989
76 people want to read
About the author
Fanny Howe
91 books161 followersFanny Quincy Howe was an American poet, novelist and short story writer. She was raised in Cambridge, Massachusetts. Howe wrote more than 20 books of poetry and prose. Her major works include poetry such as One Crossed Out, Gone, and Second Childhood; the novels Nod, The Deep North, and Indivisible; and collected essays such as The Wedding Dress: Meditations on Word and Life and The Winter Sun: Notes on a Vocation.
Howe received praise and official recognition: she was awarded the 2009 Ruth Lilly Poetry Prize by the Poetry Foundation. She also received the Gold Medal for Poetry from the Commonwealth Club of California. In addition, her Selected Poems received the 2001 Lenore Marshall Poetry Prize from the Academy of American Poets for the most outstanding book of poetry published in 2000. She was a finalist for the 2015 International Booker Prize. She also received awards from the National Endowment for the Arts, the National Poetry Foundation, the California Arts Council, and the Village Voice. She was professor of writing and literature at the University of California, San Diego and lived in Cambridge, Massachusetts.
Howe received praise and official recognition: she was awarded the 2009 Ruth Lilly Poetry Prize by the Poetry Foundation. She also received the Gold Medal for Poetry from the Commonwealth Club of California. In addition, her Selected Poems received the 2001 Lenore Marshall Poetry Prize from the Academy of American Poets for the most outstanding book of poetry published in 2000. She was a finalist for the 2015 International Booker Prize. She also received awards from the National Endowment for the Arts, the National Poetry Foundation, the California Arts Council, and the Village Voice. She was professor of writing and literature at the University of California, San Diego and lived in Cambridge, Massachusetts.
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Displaying 1 - 4 of 4 reviews
June 10, 2021
okay so i have a lot of thoughts about this book and they are still developing so bear with me.
This was my first Fanny Howe and I went in with no idea what to expect, though it turned out to be an interesting progression as I had just finished reading Passing by Nella Larsen.
The book touches on some interesting subjects but all of them, though particularly the race issue, i felt could have been expanded upon, considering it’s a pretty short read. It is very beautifully written and it resonated with me a lot at the beginning. The tensions and dysfunctional family dynamics were well-written and very compelling but slowly fizzled out as the novel progressed. The racial climate of the north as alluded to in the title seems like it will play a larger part than it ends up playing, which was foreshadowed by the clumsy way in which it was discussed from about page two. Had the clumsiness been embraced it could have been interesting too, but Howe appears to see herself as some sort of authority on morality in politics and race dynamics, something that did not show in this book at all. It just felt like Howe didn’t know what she was talking about, I would bet she didn’t have any friends who weren’t white. If she did one of them might have said, hey Fanny babe, what the fuck is this?
the protagonist, G, comes from a blue-blood family in Boston, however she has dark hair and olive coloured skin from her mothers italian heritage which will eventually allow her to pass as a person of colour and gain access to “new and exciting circles” of people for her.
Her family coasts by on a liberal surface, the mother telling G of how charmed she is by her young lovers communist tendencies, only to go home and fire her maids husband, who is Black, for his communist affiliations (the story takes place in the 50s and 60s). Though G appears to hate this in them, by the end of the novel she appears to have done a similar thing deceiving a community so she can live out some kind of perverted white fantasy of oppression, as they say, pick a struggle babe.
G reminded me of Franny from Franny and Zoe, the depressive young privileged white woman who has a sense of being terribly morally superior to everyone else while not doing anything discernibly better than any of them, nor actually helping any of the communities they claim to understand and care about.
Howe appears to know this is not acceptable behaviour, but is also, in many ways, as wishy washy with her actual political stances as her protagonist. I read an interview with her, hoping to get some insight about this, in an interview with BOMB mag she says: “I wrote stories and prayed, was a socialist ideologue. In reaction, I married a conservative but troubled microbiologist whom I left three days after the assassination of JFK.”
G follows a similar arc, though it doesn’t lead her anywhere - i don’t know enough about Fanny Howe to say whether this is true of her too.
I know poets don’t like saying things, but if you’re a white person examining race relations you can’t coast by on saying you ideologically disagree with racism and think that’s enough. This could have been something really interesting, and it certainly made me think, but that was more by its shortcomings than it’s success. Howe never really discusses race, Gs proximity to this life appears to only be a part of her character development and quest for an identity.
Somewhere along the way we lose the message. Howe insists at the beginning on all the destructive habits G picks up from surviving in her dysfunctional family, but it doesn’t come back later as i would have expected it to. In the end what has Gemma's exercise in deception really meant? Howe doesn’t tell us, and I don’t mind authors not telling the reader everything but in this case it felt lazy, like a thought that wasn’t carried out til the end. Something akin to a guy taking acid and claiming to have discovered empathy.
It would have been nice to hear more than a couple of sentences from the characters who weren’t white in a book that claims to examine race relations. To me Augustine felt pretty badly written and not very believable, only serving to open the door into a new place in society for G to try on for size as well as indulging her white saviour complex. Howe does mention that many of the coloured characters don’t believe Gs ancestry but doesn’t go any further into it than that.
All in all, I will be reading more Fanny Howe, her prose style is very beautiful I just hope the content will be better next time.
This was my first Fanny Howe and I went in with no idea what to expect, though it turned out to be an interesting progression as I had just finished reading Passing by Nella Larsen.
The book touches on some interesting subjects but all of them, though particularly the race issue, i felt could have been expanded upon, considering it’s a pretty short read. It is very beautifully written and it resonated with me a lot at the beginning. The tensions and dysfunctional family dynamics were well-written and very compelling but slowly fizzled out as the novel progressed. The racial climate of the north as alluded to in the title seems like it will play a larger part than it ends up playing, which was foreshadowed by the clumsy way in which it was discussed from about page two. Had the clumsiness been embraced it could have been interesting too, but Howe appears to see herself as some sort of authority on morality in politics and race dynamics, something that did not show in this book at all. It just felt like Howe didn’t know what she was talking about, I would bet she didn’t have any friends who weren’t white. If she did one of them might have said, hey Fanny babe, what the fuck is this?
the protagonist, G, comes from a blue-blood family in Boston, however she has dark hair and olive coloured skin from her mothers italian heritage which will eventually allow her to pass as a person of colour and gain access to “new and exciting circles” of people for her.
Her family coasts by on a liberal surface, the mother telling G of how charmed she is by her young lovers communist tendencies, only to go home and fire her maids husband, who is Black, for his communist affiliations (the story takes place in the 50s and 60s). Though G appears to hate this in them, by the end of the novel she appears to have done a similar thing deceiving a community so she can live out some kind of perverted white fantasy of oppression, as they say, pick a struggle babe.
G reminded me of Franny from Franny and Zoe, the depressive young privileged white woman who has a sense of being terribly morally superior to everyone else while not doing anything discernibly better than any of them, nor actually helping any of the communities they claim to understand and care about.
Howe appears to know this is not acceptable behaviour, but is also, in many ways, as wishy washy with her actual political stances as her protagonist. I read an interview with her, hoping to get some insight about this, in an interview with BOMB mag she says: “I wrote stories and prayed, was a socialist ideologue. In reaction, I married a conservative but troubled microbiologist whom I left three days after the assassination of JFK.”
G follows a similar arc, though it doesn’t lead her anywhere - i don’t know enough about Fanny Howe to say whether this is true of her too.
I know poets don’t like saying things, but if you’re a white person examining race relations you can’t coast by on saying you ideologically disagree with racism and think that’s enough. This could have been something really interesting, and it certainly made me think, but that was more by its shortcomings than it’s success. Howe never really discusses race, Gs proximity to this life appears to only be a part of her character development and quest for an identity.
Somewhere along the way we lose the message. Howe insists at the beginning on all the destructive habits G picks up from surviving in her dysfunctional family, but it doesn’t come back later as i would have expected it to. In the end what has Gemma's exercise in deception really meant? Howe doesn’t tell us, and I don’t mind authors not telling the reader everything but in this case it felt lazy, like a thought that wasn’t carried out til the end. Something akin to a guy taking acid and claiming to have discovered empathy.
It would have been nice to hear more than a couple of sentences from the characters who weren’t white in a book that claims to examine race relations. To me Augustine felt pretty badly written and not very believable, only serving to open the door into a new place in society for G to try on for size as well as indulging her white saviour complex. Howe does mention that many of the coloured characters don’t believe Gs ancestry but doesn’t go any further into it than that.
All in all, I will be reading more Fanny Howe, her prose style is very beautiful I just hope the content will be better next time.
May 29, 2025
Fanny………… There’s no one like her
January 2, 2011
One of those books that are lyrical and beautiful and I love it at first but then about half way in I feel like I have very little connection to the characters even though there is so much insightful language. I feel this way a lot when reading novels written by poets, it's almost like the lack of excess mundanity is a barrier to getting into the rhythm of the book for me. Sometimes that boring prosey stuff has to be there for something to open up, and for a sort of intimacy to be established. I don't really know what I'm talking about. This was a really good book, there were parts that I really loved, I'm just not able to fully appreciate it as a novel.
February 27, 2011
I have a big writer crush on Fanny Howe.
Her take on the human experience, her sentences blow me away.
Her take on the human experience, her sentences blow me away.
Displaying 1 - 4 of 4 reviews