North Carolina Literature in a Global Context
TRAVELING THE PSYCHIC HIGHWAY a review by Kathaleen E. Amende Monica Byrne. The Girl in the Road: A Novel. New York: Crown Publishers, 2014.
KATHALEEN E. AMENDE has a PhD from Tulane University and is an Associate Professor of English and the Associate Dean of the College of Liberal Arts and Social Sciences at Alabama State University. Her scholarship includes the book Desire and the Divine: Feminine Identity in White Southern Women’s Writing (Louisiana State UP, 2013) and an NCLR 2014 essay on William Forstchen’s post-apocalyptic novel One Second After, set in Black Mountain, NC. MONICA BYRNE has a BA in Biochemistry and Religion from Wellesley and an MS in Geochemistry from MIT. She has been published in a number of literary journals, including the Virginia Quarterly Review. Several of her original plays have been performed by such venues as Manbites Dog Theater in Durham, NC, where the author lives, and in New York City at the New York International Fringe Festival.
Monica Byrne’s first novel, The Girl in the Road, a science fiction and fantasy literary hybrid, has been reviewed positively by awardwinning and respected novelists such as Kim Stanley Robinson and Neil Gaiman, and many of the readers quoted on sites such as Goodreads and Amazon have also found the novel worthy of praise. Set in 2068, The Girl in the Road consists of the intertwining stories of two young women on two different journeys – Mariama is an Ethiopian girl escaping slavery, and Meena is an Indian woman making her way to Ethiopia to find the woman who killed her parents. Although their stories parallel one another in interesting and sometimes troubling ways – and eventually collide – the two are connected primarily thematically and literarily. Meena’s story provides the framework for the novel, as she attempts to cross the “Trail,” a 3300-kilometer path that bobs and rocks as it spans the Indian Ocean between Asia and Africa. Meena’s trials – from escaping the terrorist group she believes is hunting her, to learning how to walk on the path, to dealing with the loss of the electronic “scroll” that connects her with the rest of the world – are depicted as steps in a pilgrimage that will ultimately force her to examine her own identity to determine who she is and who she wants to be. Byrne’s writing is compelling, interesting, and lively. Readers are easily drawn into the stories of the two women at the heart of this novel, and there are plenty of opportunities for a range of emotional responses, including fear, amusement, joy, and sadness. But it is Byrne’s treatment of issues so relevant to today’s society that
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make this novel stand out from other science fiction and fantasy novels. In particular, her tackling of sexuality, human weaknesses, and abuse are nuanced and intricately sophisticated in ways that are reminiscent of Dorothy Allison’s writing, particularly in Bastard Out of Carolina. In a disturbing scene of abuse that has drawn some diverse reactions from readers, Byrne shows that human beings, even ones we like, are flawed. She acknowledges and accepts that people who do horrible things are also the same people we love and care about, and that all people are ultimately the protagonists of their own stories. Byrne’s treatment of sexuality is more complex than we see in many contemporary novels. Meena is a pansexual woman who starts the novel involved with a transgendered woman and who has sexual relations with both men and women throughout the course of the book. What is ultimately most intriguing about Byrne’s depiction of sexuality is not whom the characters have sex with, but the fact that Byrne does not do anything to draw our attention to Meena’s pansexuality or to any character’s sexual preference; if anything, she treats all gender preferences as normal, as choices that do not need explanation. Meena is unafraid to engage in whatever kind of sex interests her, and Mariama, despite being a young girl, has already begun to develop a sexual identity. In a society where we struggle to accept both homosexuality and female sexuality as normal, Byrne accepts that women can have strong, healthy sexual appetites, and more controversially, that female sexuality can exist even in young girls.