REVIEW: “Queenie” by Candice Carty-Williams

So, tits on the table, I went into Queenie with pretty high expectations.

Despite not having read any actual in-depth reviews beforehand, that big, shiny “2020 British Book of the Year” page header carries a certain weight, and I’ll admit that I formed some preconceptions accordingly…

In any case, I offer you a brief (largely spoiler-free) synopsis before we get into it:

Dubbed “the black Bridget Jones” by the author herself, Candice Carty-Williams’ novel spans a year in the life of one Queenie Jenkins: a twenty-something, London-based, Jamaican-British journalist, introduced reeling from the fallout of a messy breakup and on course for total self-destruction.

While the setup appears pretty true to the tagline, the novel breaks new ground as the story progresses, with Carty-Williams addressing topics that range from the challenges posed by interracial dating, to the inherited stigma surrounding mental health among POC. Helpless, we watch Queenie hurtle through a seemingly endless series of bad decisions, culminating in the loss of friendships, employment, and - most devastatingly - independence. In turn, the final part of the book follows the bumpy road to recovery, to an ending that is, if not exactly happy, arguably hopeful.

Now, in the interest of full disclosure, I have not read Bridget Jones’ s Diary (1996) - which, incidentally, bagged Helen Fielding the very same award in 1998 - and frankly I have no real desire to remedy this. However, I think I’ve been subjected to the film enough times to pick up on the obvious parallels between both works: young woman working in media in London attempts to navigate love, sex, friendship, family and career, with varying levels of success.

And while I’m reluctant to take the author’s comparison too seriously, given that the only circumstances under which I can imagine any POC writer willingly referring to their work as ‘the x version of [insert successful White Thing]’ are in a bid to broaden audience appeal, I do think Queenie provokes an important discussion about the way whiteness operates within genre:

In an interview with The Guardian in February 2020, Candice Carty-Williams points out that “most fiction by black authors gets pigeonholed into literary fiction”. Indeed, while we can quibble over the arbitrary quality of “literariness” all day, I’ll openly admit that until fairly recently the only black authors I’d read as an adult were ones who might appear on my uni reading list. Names like Zadie Smith and Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie likely spring to mind, and when I read British Book Awards Winner that’s the path my thoughts automatically took.

By contrast, Bridget Jones’s Diary is upheld as the archetypal ‘Chick Lit’ novel even today, and if we momentarily set aside the blatant injustice of a woman writing a woman’s perspective being deserving of its own condescending designation, it’s worth interrogating how the presence (if not the centring) of race in Queenie complicates this kind of categorisation.

As I’d like to think we all recognise by now, having White Privilege does not mean living a life free from hardship, but rather living a life that is not made more difficult on account of your race. In turn, while Queenie and Bridget seem to face a lot of the same problems, Carty-Williams stresses how Queenie’s blackness lends another dimension to her experiences: Where both characters encounter unabashedly shitty men, Queenie is subjected to demeaning racial fetishisation throughout the book; where both women feel unfulfilled in their careers, Queenie’s article pitches are regularly dismissed as too ‘radical’, while an under-qualified, white, male intern is praised and promoted; and maybe most damning of all, while both protagonists engage in inappropriate workplace romances, Bridget faces no real consequences for her relationship with her boss, essentially breezing into a better job in a different field, whereas Queenie’s tryst with a colleague ends in formal disciplinary measures that leave her unemployed for months.

This brings me to my chief criticism of the novel, and oddly enough it’s the same theme that keeps cropping up in Queenie’s glowing reviews: humour.

Call me a joyless hag, but between the barrage of microaggressions, the relentless self-sabotage, the unaddressed childhood trauma and the public panic attacks, I genuinely cannot find the humour in this book.

Don’t get me wrong - it’s not an unending river of pain: there are moments of levity in Queenie’s interactions with her friends and grandparents, and the narrative doesn’t get tied up in lengthy passages of depressing introspection every time something bad happens (or else the book would likely be twice the length). And maybe there is a sort of irreverence in Carty-Williams’ depiction of ‘everyday racism’ - the stark, crassness of the audacity, received with Queenie’s dry internal monologue. But if humour is supposed to bridge the gap between literary fiction and chick lit à la Bridget Jones, Queenie falls short for me, and in so doing falls into a space all of its own.

TL;DR - It’s hard to call a book ‘accessible’ without sounding condescending, but I think it is the most fitting term and the author’s intention: the first-person narrative is engaging and reasonably fast-paced, the characters are vibrant and delightfully flawed (I guarantee we all know a Cassandra), but Candice Carty-Williams’ real triumph is in her deft handling of heavy topics. It’s an unflinching commentary on black womanhood that refuses to coddle the reader, wrapped up in a classic post-breakup meltdown that never quite manages to feel like hard work. I can’t honestly say that I enjoyed reading Queenie, but I also couldn’t put it down, so make of that what you will.