Red at the Bone is about a black family in New York, including Sadie and her husband Po'Boy, their daughter Iris and her husband Aubrey, and their daughter Melody. Iris left her husband and daughter for college and lesbianism.

You’ll notice that summary is lacking a plot, much like this novel. Red at the Bone has no plot. It is short, but there is nothing suggest why it starts where it does or ends where it does. It has no inciting incident and has no major dramatic question. It’s from everyone’s perspective too and spans a couple of decades. It’s just about their lives. Their mostly boring, privileged lives. Why do I say they’re privileged? Because Sadie and Po'Boy are rich, or at least rich enough to worry about legacies and have gold squirreled away that they’re too dumb to tell other family members about before they kick the bucket. They have catered parties to which they wear tailored dresses. Yet I get to read about their problems as if they matter with no actual goal in mind for what I’m waiting for. Seriously, the only way to get through this novel is sheer force of will. It is eyerollingly annoying to read about people with money talk about how hard their lives are, especially when nothing interesting is going on anyway.

The only one worth any real sympathy is Aubrey because he grew up homeless. Honestly that’s the lowest level of privilege. There’s so much about the privilege hierarchy these days, but it always involves the willful ignorance of class, which is heads and shoulders worse than any other metric of suffering besides literal abuse and serious chronic health conditions. I wouldn’t even put Po'Boy’s cancer on the same level because he was older when he got it, meaning he had already lived long enough to see his granddaughter reach high school age. Some people may argue that I should feel bad for Sadie, or Iris, or Melody, but I don’t. First off, they’re all more well off than I’ve ever been or ever will be, and more than most people I know. For one thing, they’re living in New York, one of the most expensive cities in the world, and they can afford a rather large place. A place that has an interior staircase in a city that puts a premium on space. Whatever problems they have, they’re mostly due to their own internal bullshit that they’re not working to get over and I have very little sympathy for the emotional problems of people too selfish to improve themselves when they literally have every opportunity to do so. Fictional or not.

Both Iris and Melody are spoiled. There’s no other word for it. Iris thought nothing could touch her, including nature of all things, and then when she screwed up what should have been an easy life, she still managed to get past all that and live the privileged life she was supposed to in the first place. Mostly by abandoning all her real responsibilities. She even talks about how she outgrew them, meaning Aubrey and Melody. Oh, I’m sorry, are your child and husband a pair of pants that you no longer fit or that fell out of style? Or are they people? People with needs and feelings? Iris is a junk human being who stays selfish the whole book, and I think I’m supposed to feel sympathy for her, and I really can’t see one good reason why I should. She “made mistakes” but never takes responsibility for those mistakes. Instead, she runs from any reminder of them. It’s pathetic. Her first foray into lesbianism with Jam is tainted by the fact that she lies to Jam about Melody being her sister. Now, I could see at the beginning of a relationship that information being no one’s business, but once sex is on the table, a person’s got to be honest, because if you’re not trusting the person you’re about to have sex with with major information about yourself, then you shouldn’t be having sex with them no matter how much they turn you on. So Jam shouldn’t have been upset that Iris lied from the beginning, but she had every right to be upset once the relationship changed to something more intimate and Iris continued to lie to her. Also, Iris was married! If Jam didn’t want to get involved with a married woman, she had every right to know beforehand that Iris was married so that she could make a decision about that. Iris respects no one. Not her parents, not Aubrey, not Melody, and not Jam. She basically shouldn’t get involved with people, period, until she learns how to value them.

Melody is a typical, spoiled teenage girl, so it’s not even like I can say much about her. I didn’t like teenage girls, especially rich ones, when I was a teenage girl myself. I’ve had to read way too many female coming of age narratives in book clubs I have since abandoned for being too woke. In one of them, the head of the book club, a guy, once said those stories interested him the most because he never was a girl or young woman. I thought, well, I was. Do you think I want to read about it a million times? It’s not a new story to me. It’s one I’ve experienced. I don’t read to read about my own experience. I get him wanting to step outside himself. That’s why a lot of us read. But when choosing books for a book club, it’s probably best to not think only of your experience, but those attending as well. The thing is, even if you’ve never experienced being a girl or a young woman, one story should get it done, because the experience is vapid and stupid. It’s mostly filled with insecurities, which are tiring to read about too much. “No one ever talks about how hard it is to be a teenage girl,” I’ve heard argued. Yes, they do! Constantly! That’s all teenage girls ever talk about! Always! Their obsession with themselves follows them often even into adulthood that they write shitty fiction about how hard it was and then people read it at crappy book clubs so that they can also talk about how hard it was for them as a teenage girl. “I feel so seen!” they say. Well, you fucking better, because no one ever stops talking about this! I’m in my mid-30s. If I’m as stuck on my coming of age period of life as some of these women were in their 40s, 50s, and even 60s, feel free to shoot me. It was probably the least interesting period of my life.

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