Acting Out - Book Review

by Benilde Little The Free Press, January 2003 $23.00, ISBN 0-684-85480-5

"The Box." In terms of womanhood, the words conjure up something, well, unflatteringly female. Yet for Benilde Little, an author who writes about women in all their incarnations, "the box" is something even more threatening. The box is confining, something soul-stealing.

In Acting Out, Little's third novel, we're introduced to Paige, a just-40 suburban mother of three who played it safe by marrying Jay, a man who leaves her for a younger woman at the start of the novel. Despite her pain, Paige remains clear-headed, self-aware and reflective. Even as her world is falling apart, Paige's cool persona begins to explore the box she has made for herself. It is then that she begins to come alive.

"Do we really change or does life or circumstances force us to adjust ourselves to fit in, just to get up in the morning?" she muses. "The fundamental problem between us [was that] he aspired to being in the box and I'd discovered that I couldn't breathe in it."

One in a long line of female characters in Little's books who are willful and heady, Paige's dreams have been put on hold but not forgotten. Little writes of "phillies," women abandoned, full-of-life, against-the-grain, steel-willed women--women who carried their own water and weren't crushed by it. Little writes complete stories of smart, black women with rich inner lives.

Picking up the pieces after her failed marriage, Paige discovers the woman that she was before the box closed in on her--the photographer, the artist, the woman with passion. By the novel's end, however, there is an unresolved question about where the marriage is going.

Once again, Little does the good deed by capturing black life--gay, straight, bourgeois, "boxed" in, or some combination thereof. She tells an engaging contemporary tale in all its colors, nuances and shades. And she clearly writes outside the box.

--Angela Bronner is a Harlem-based writer and CEO of The PlayGyrlz Music Group Inc., a music production company.

COPYRIGHT 2003 Cox, Matthews & Associates
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