Fran Ross

Born to a Jewish father and black mother who divorce before she is two, Oreo grows up in Philadelphia with her maternal grandparents while her mother tours with a theatrical troupe. Soon after puberty, Oreo heads for New York with a pack on her back to search for her father; but in the big city she discovers that there are dozens of Sam Schwartzes in the phone book, and Oreo's mission turns into a wickedly humorous picaresque quest. The ambitious and playful narrative challenges accepted notions of race, ethnicity, culture, and even the novelistic form itself.

Oreo

With an introduction by the Man Booker Prize-winning author of A Brief History of Seven Killings, Marlon James 'Oreo's satire on racial identity reads like a story for our times . . . Could Oreo be this year's Stoner? Observer ‘A rollicking little masterpiece . . . one of the most delightful, hilarious, intelligent novels I’ve stumbled across in recent years’ Paul Auster Oreo has been raised by her maternal grandparents in Philadelphia. Her black mother tours with a theatrical troupe, and her Jewish deadbeat dad disappeared when she was an infant, leaving behind a mysterious note. Oreo’s quest is to find her father, and discover the secret of her birth. What ensues in Fran Ross's opus is a playful, modernized parody of the classical odyssey of Theseus with a feminist twist, immersed in seventies pop culture, and mixing standard English, black vernacular, and Yiddish with wisecracking aplomb. Oreo, our young hero, navigates the labyrinth of sound studios and brothels and subway tunnels in Manhattan, seeking to claim her birthright while unwittingly experiencing and triggering a mythic journey of self-discovery like no other.

Moray Lyle McIntosh

Ferociously funny and fiendishly clever Fran Ross retells the story of Theseus as it’s never been told before. Christine aka Oreo is the half-black, half-Jewish teenage protagonist whose bizarre life mirrors that of the eponymous Greek hero. How sad that it languished, mostly unacknowledged since its original publication in 1974 but how fantastic that it may now get the recognition it deserves. I strongly recommend that you brush up on the story of Theseus so that you don’t miss any of the hilarious and ingenious parallels that Moss weaves into her story, creating a fiercely feminist rendering of all its tired patriarchal symbols.
The satire is razor-sharp and be warned some of the jokes will inevitably cut you because they can run extremely close to the knuckle. Expect the whole range of humour here from gross scatological puns, to humorous algebraic equations and clever wordplay the writing is brash and fearless in the best possible way.

Oreo is of course a very loaded term and it’s typical of Ross’s mischievous approach that she never addresses the common meaning of the term, a black person who is white on the inside. The acid racial commentary described in the appalled reactions of both families to the coupling of Oreo’s parents, her grandfather physically paralysed into a “half-swastika” of horror and has built up a successful business with the sole intent of fleecing Jewish people. The fact that he has so many happy Jewish customers suggests that he doesn’t exactly succeed in the objective.

Despite the merciless racial satire of both sides of Oreo’s family Ross avoids many of the tropes often associated with literature by black women, eschewing the redemptive tone, the links with the blues, the Bible and the South. Where they do appear it’s usually so that she can tear them down with uproarious results such as the inexplicable and (deliberately) semi-indecipherable speech of Oreo’s grandmother Louise.

Oreo is gloriously at home in her own skin, as black, as Jewish and as a women and it’s hugely refreshing to see her own the multiplicity of her identity so fully and confidently, best represented in the dizzying mixing of Yiddish and black vernacular that characterises her speech. She draws strength from her duality rather than isolation; she is not alienated from both worlds she fully inhabits both. But Ross isn’t bound just (if it’s possible to say “just”) the slang and swerve of two languages she also bends English to her needs, creating portmanteau words and apt verb constructions with gusto, each one wildly evocative. What could be more appropriate than a “rothshild of rich people”?

The importance of the linguistic style is accompanied by all the quirks that make good postmodernism so exciting: non-linearity, extra-textual diagrams, mathematical equations, glossaries but also a sly playfulness that fully integrates these elements into the story so that they are more than just narrative oddities. Ross shows that classical mythology, with all its innate absurdities, is the perfect medium for postmodernism’s best excesses. Oreo glories in its own form without being hampered by a need for grit, realism or dour profundity. It achieves weight through creativity and humour but achieves it nonetheless; the essence of satire at its very best.

Elena

Muriel Trystero

Hannah Pilling

With an introduction by the Man Booker Prize-winning author of A Brief History of Seven Killings, Marlon James 'A rollicking little masterpiece . . . one of the most delightful, hilarious, intelligent novels I've stumbled across in recent years' Paul Auster Oreo has been raised by her maternal grandparents in Philadelphia. Her black mother tours with a theatrical troupe, and her Jewish deadbeat dad disappeared when she was an infant, leaving behind a mysterious note. Oreo's quest is to find her father, and discover the secret of her birth.What ensues in Fran Ross's opus is a playful, modernized parody of the classical odyssey of Theseus with a feminist twist, immersed in seventies pop culture, and mixing standard English, black vernacular, and Yiddish with wisecracking aplomb.Oreo, our young hero, navigates the labyrinth of sound studios and brothels and subway tunnels in Manhattan, seeking to claim her birthright while unwittingly experiencing and triggering a mythic journey of self-discovery like no other.

Oreo

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