The Only Ones by Carola Dibbell
My rating: 3 of 5 stars
Fairly promising book in the start, in terms of language but it tapers down to be stagnant towards the end. By tackling bioengineering in the way that it does, Dibbell aligns the view of the novel to the medical subject; in this instance, women’s management of bodies, motherhood and disease. There’s a big segue into education here, and Dibbell is careful to show how management of human bodies is also management of children’s minds. What appears at first to be a post-dystopia about the future ends up being a fairly static view that the novel then shoots off with the logical resolution of the conflict between the mother and her daughter and then with how the daughter situation is resolved quickly in order to leave the mother in a different zone, where she is then able to relate to all of us. I find this move a little unconvincing because it seems forced. The ending lacks a climax. The very promising stuttering of language from a very limited medical subjectivity in the beginning eventually pairs out to be a limited social-epidemiological horizon towards the end of the book. The mother doesn’t seem to own her own enlightenment because there doesn’t seem to be an implicit point at which the daughters behavior sparks a realization of some sort.
In that sense, the novel seems to crash under its own weight once the confusing and dense (but exciting) language the novel started with finally becomes normalized once we get a sense of place and time. Maybe I missed the point, and I am not sure that I have, but there doesn’t seem to be a point. The main antagonism of the novel never occurs (the They never materialize) and that conflict seems left by the wayside. Instead, the daughter enters the world on her own in the exact same way that the mother is shown to be in the world in the beginning. In that sense, the 17 or so years never changed the world, and that’s kind of confusing. We don’t need a larger story about how the world got so dystopic, and thank you Dibbell for not giving it to us; but the struggle that the world goes forward with never materializes as being relevant to today, but only a little. We aren’t hit in the face with the mother’s revelation in the way that I think we are supposed to be.
For that reason, I was disappointed. What was the mystery? What should have happened? I don’t know, but instead, we get the mother’s long long long struggle to raise her daughter and then her daughter does what the mother did, and the mother suddenly knows what’s going on, as the voice informs us from a place of knowing, but we never quite share in that moment of knowing. Instead, we see the daughter doing what the mother did. And how is that the only ones?
I’m going to read the ending again, maybe something more will come of it.
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