Nick Fagerlund's Reviews > The Pox Party

In broad genre terms, it's a slave story, but it's a consummately weird one that flickers in and out of other genres and spheres of influence, the most notable encroachments being on the Gothic novel\* and the heroic literature of the American Revolution. The idea I keep turning around in my head is that it's in a complicated and fairly aggressive dialogue with some long-term trends in YA--correct me if you remember differently, but didn't most of the Revolutionary War novels largely ignore the question of slavery, and didn't most of the slave novels stay fairly isolated within the plantation atmosphere, and weren't the Gothic-influenced novels pretty much separated from historical context altogether? Anderson's seems to be aiming to pollute every part of historical YA fiction with... everything else. (And I want to briefly mention another thing he's doing, at least with the first part of the story: I think Octavian's early life is set up in such a way as to isolate and distill the horror of slavery itself. By having the protagonist raised in comfort and relative ease, and withholding until later the gross physical degradations of slavery as practiced in the Americas--that is, by removing the other types of horror that might confuse the issue--Anderson leaves only the _existential_ horror of slavery: the horror of being _owned,_ of being something other than a person. And, okay, that's right there in the title, and every other evil of slavery comes crashing back in in the second half the book, but still, I think the method is worth acknowledging.)

Anyway, right, the story itself. I liked it. Octavian is an interesting character and a weird-ass narrator: an unreliable one who desires, above nearly all else, to be reliable (and is caught, furthermore, between incompatible definitions of reliability). The pathos is intense, the plotting is actually pretty brilliant, and I really do find myself wondering what Octavian will ultimately do and what his reasons will be. I think Anderson's doing a good job at asking questions that aren't, in any conventional way, answerable. And at wrecking poor Octavian's life.


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\* Yes, the slave novel is intrinsically quite gothic in the first place, but Octavian is raised in 1. a wealthy and well-appointed house, which is 2. largely isolated from the outside world, with 3. murky relationships of power and sex between all its adults, in which there is 4. a secret room where he is forbidden to go. So... Gothic, instead of just gothic. You know what I'm saying.