Thank you to the publisher for allowing me to read and review this ARC. Full review to be found on Goodreads and on my website.

The narration of Theory is really interesting; for some reason, it brought up for me a lot of questions about gender and queer theories. The structure of it is also very well executed, with some sort of movement of micro and macro views of events, also sometimes mimicking the act of dissertation itself. The writing is very compelling and intriguing, and even though it's written with an in Fabula point of view, the narrator keeps a distance from the reader. They choose which information we are privy to, and which one is kept undisclosed. The academic reality is very well represented, in all its uncertainties, overthinking, characters, experiences, and lifestyle. And, as someone who explored that world, I truly appreciated all the references to -- theory --.

February is Black History Month, so it seemed appropriate to go back in my backlog of books to review and pull out this one for a read considering that Canadian author Dionne Brand is a person of colour. Brand is an author that I haven’t read in much depth, but I did like one of her previous novels, What We All Long For. That book didn’t exactly blow my socks off in terms of being an original read, but it was well constructed for what it was – a minor saga about the immigrant experience in Toronto, Canada. Since I generally liked one of her previous books, I thought I’d try her latest, Theory. I have to say that with this novel, I had the opposite reaction to it than I had with What We All Long For. That is, it’s an original read – and highly so – but other than that, the book lapses into academic writing that is all flash and sizzle, and not much real meat. Having said that, I will say that the book is a page-turner. Once I’d started, I had a hard time putting it down. I read it all in just a couple of sittings. Why? I don’t know. It’s hard to say. Maybe it’s because Brand is a dazzling writer who can make even the pretentious seem interesting?

Basically, Theory is written like a dissertation on love. It’s the story of a female narrator who is in graduate school, writing her Ph.D. thesis, and, during the course of some 15 years or so, falls in love with three other women. Each chapter looks at the stormy love affair with these folks: Selah, beautiful but too vain for her own good; Yara, an artist who takes on more passion projects for social justice than she should; and Odalys, who dabbles mercilessly with the occult. With each successive relationship, the narrator gets more and more lost in her thesis, not sure what she’s going to end up writing. Finally, the last chapter of the book is random notes about her family life and upbringing and what she’s come up with in terms of a way forward in her work. The End.

Theory is, at least in part, a monologue about academia, then, and it’s often a funny one because it’s just so exaggerated. However, that means that the book also lapses into academic mumbo jumbo talk, and you get impenetrable sentences such as these: “Wynter says, and I quote, ‘a mainstream scholar necessarily takes his point of departure from a pre-Fanonian, and thereby purely ontogenetic perspective (with the identity of the human ‘us’ being seen as a supracultural one defined only by its own)’ … .” Say wha? And that’s just an example I’d bookmarked on my Kindle as the entire last quarter of the book is written largely like this. In the acknowledgments, Brand, well, acknowledges that she basically cut and pasted from other academic writers. So, yes, sections of the story almost purposely don’t make sense as they are examples culled from somewhere else.

Because Brand is essentially making it by faking it here, Theory lapses into the worst kind of caricature. It impersonates the seriousness of academic writing, and, by playing it straight, Brand really kinds the wheels out from under her and makes what she’s writing about seem as though it is one nonsensical joke. I’m sure that’s not the intended effect she had. I can say that because I’m very sure that Dionne Brand is one very smart woman. She is way smarter than me (as she has an Order of Canada, along with a Governor General's Literary Award to boot). Still, whether or not the humor was intended or not, I guess it can be said that Theory is overstated writing. It really goes over the top in making its case.

Still, the novel is quite enjoyable once you get used to the fact that Brand is trying to pull off a narrator that is smarter than you in scholarly matters, but maybe not so smarter than you when it comes to matters of love and desire. One can draw a line between the main character’s inability to narrow down a thesis topic to the fact that she has trouble finding her one true love. However, is the narrator to be laughed at for her inability to winnow things down? Is she merely pathetic because she refuses to confine to the normal capitalistic means to get a real degree – not the interdisciplinary one she’s pursuing in this book – that she can use to get a job, which her father wants of her? Or is she brave, not willing to settle on love until the real right one comes along, and not willing to settle on her essay topic because she wants to come up with a truly ground-breaking and original line of thought?

Whatever the case may be, Theory is a mild diversion. I’ll confess that I didn’t really understand large parts of it, and I also didn’t really understand my attraction to the novel and why I devoured it the way that I did. Maybe that’s a testament to the writing style of Ms. Brand and the fact that she can make even the seemingly mundane seem less than routine, if not believable. There’s something intangible about this book that I can’t put my finger on that makes it likable – even if the first chapter is nothing but one very long footnote. (Groan! A cliché about academic writing if there was one!) Whether or not you’ll enjoy Theory is going to hinge on the fact that you enjoy parodies of novels set in the academic world. Whether this book is a parody or not is to be determined by yours truly, though, much like the ongoing struggle to come up with a title for the narrator’s fictitious thesis. Still, there’s much fun to be had here, even if it means struggling with concepts and stuff you might not understand – making this book a worthy addition to reading during Black History Month if you have nothing better to do.

I am such a fan of Dionne Brand's critical writing, so assumed that I would love a novel about theory itself. The book itself is brilliant, the writing at the level you'd expect from Brand, the themes explored very important and timely, the structure was well-conceived, but to my mind as a reader (and not an academic) it really lacked a kind of human component. This is not necessarily a bad thing, but I felt I could not ever fully relate to the main character. And since the main character is really the only character (aside from her lovers which really, are only screens or mirrors), that left for a somewhat hollow feeling while reading.

Now, as an academic, obviously I thought the book had incredible merit. Aside from the tackling of the scenario of graduate school and the somewhat ridiculous amount of time and heart that can take, I thought the exploration of academia as a kind of mental condition was deeply astute.

Both the brilliance and the disappointment of the book is the creation of the main character. She is so essentially single-minded and self-absorbed that by the end of the book, the reader doesn't really care whether it's the patriarchy and all its problems which made her that way or whether it is some sort of personal failing (which, as I've understood it was meant to be the main thematic tension). At some point she sort of falls away from her friends and colleagues and I have to admit that I would have probably drifted out of her life as well.

Appropriately, I think it would be a wonderful book to analyze theoretically. But it was not such an enjoyable book to read.

“I felt anxiety was a necessary part of being conscious in the world; it was a prerequisite of a moral and ethical life.”

I feel the need to preface this review by stating that I did not go into this book with an unbiased mind. I have had the opportunity to learn from and work with Dionne Brand in the past. She is one of the most brilliant people I have ever met, and I could spend hours just listening to her thoughts and the way she articulates them.

I read Theory with Brand’s voice in my mind. I can’t say that I fully understand what happened in the book, but I can say that I enjoyed it. There were shining moments of brilliance that stopped me in my tracks and caused me to re-read the words until they imprinted themselves in my mind (for example, the sentence “It is, in fact, the male body that is biology.” continues to float through my mind a day after reading it). Theory weaves together the all-consuming world of academia with the all-consuming world of love and attraction, and through the dissertation that our narrator is working on, Brand touches on a variety of issues in contemporary society (including issues of race, class, gender, privilege, erasure etc.).

One of my favourite quotes, which is powerful as hell, is as follows: “Their lives had been lived in privilege and elitism. They had fooled themselves into thinking that merely because they had privilege, they had earned it. They’d never taken into account the violence their existence had perpetrated on the world, on the very people who lived around them. They’d oiled their way into schools and clubs and journals and conferences. They actually believed that this made them worthy – they confused their privilege with intellect. These professors weren’t conservatives, by any means. Oh no, they would never consider themselves in that category. They were left-wing scholars, social theorists. But I knew, and they knew, that academia was a place for perpetuating class and class privilege. It was a place for training up the ruling classes so they could continue ruling.”

Brilliant author. Brilliant book.

Thank you to NetGalley and Penguin Random House Canada for providing me with an advanced readers copy of Theory in exchange for an honest review. All of the quotes I have provided in this review are from the published version of the book, not the ARC.

Theory follows a narrator on their journey to write a thesis that explores their relationship history. Three different relationships are brought up that appear to follow the heart, the head and the spirit as each relationship is very different and alters the narrator in a distinct way. As the narrator tries to complete their thesis we see the crossover between culture, race, gender, class and politics. I struggled to really follow the point of the book and did not gain anything profound from it. I did however enjoy how the narrator did not have a name or gender throughout. I think that was a really great statement. I have never read a book that was written like this and enjoyed how my mind wandered back and forth between genders.

Dionne Brand impresses with an intense novel that navigates the intersections of academia, love, race, gender, etc!