After last year’s disappointing ‘Mother, Missing’ (‘Missing Mom’ in the USA), ‘Black Girl/White Girl’ - her thirty-fourth adult novel under her own name - finds Joyce Carol Oates back on form. At 278 pages, it’s one of her shorter novels, briskly paced in brief chapters, many only a page long, some a few lines. Oates puts Genna’s white-liberal background and conscience under the microscope: it’s almost as if Genna is determined to find Minette a victim of oppression. But Minette doesn’t want to play that game. I haven’t spoiled the plot above: we know from the outset that Minette dies – and there’s a grim inevitability to the novel as we gradually find out how and why.

The novel’s title has a double meaning – not just black and white in the sense of Caucasian and Negroid races, but also good and bad. The novel is framed by Genna’s relationship with her father Max, a fiercely leftist civil rights lawyer whom we first see watching Nixon’s resignation on TV with his daughter. Max takes pride in the fact that his opponents cannot touch him because he takes pains not to violate any law. It’s a stance that is endangered due to his relationship with a Weather Underground-type terrorist. With some subtlety, Oates uncovers the fault lines in Genna’s sense of herself and her family background, particularly with her mother who is sympathetic to but distanced from her husband’s more extreme stances. ‘Black Girl/White Girl’ is written with Oates’s customary unflagging energy and lack of sentimentality – a gripping, powerful but not untroubling novel.

Gary Couzens was born in 1964 and lives and works in Aldershot. He has had twenty short stories accepted by F&SF, Interzone, The Third Alternative, Peeping Tom and other magazines, plus a large number of articles and reviews in The British Fantasy Society Newsletter, Zene and elsewhere. He has three novels in varying stages of completeness and has just started his fourth.