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Columbia CollEgE Today BOOKsHELF
Danielle Evans ’04 Sees the Past in the Present
in her new collection of short stories, Danielle
Evans ’04 challenges both social boundaries and
stylistic conventions. The author’s first full-length
work, Before You Suffocate Your Own Fool Self
(Riverhead Books, $25.95), is set in modern-day
America. Evans’ characters live in a world of uncertainty
and contradiction. In “Robert E. Lee Is Dead,” a
teenager rises to the top of her high school class only
to jeopardize her graduation by pulling a dangerous
prank. In “Snakes,” a biracial girl is tormented by her
white grandmother. Children are expected to make
adult choices, and prejudice persists even as the
lines between ethnic groups grow fuzzy.
At the same time, Evans’ narrative style departs
from traditional literary conventions. She mixes informal
vernacular with elegant prose, creating characters
whose most poignant remarks are hidden in
their most casual comments. Evans also collapses
time and space in her narration; though none of the
stories in her debut collection is longer than 40 pages,
many of them span several years and a wide range of
geographic locations. In “The King of a Vast Empire,” a
brother and sister travel from Massachusetts to Maryland
to Washington, D.C., all in the course of a single
night. “Jellyfish” reveals an entire family history by telling
the story of one father-daughter lunch.
Evans’ treatment of time has thematic implications
for her work. In the minds of her characters, the line between the
present and the past often is blurred. “I think readers will notice
how present the past is in the book,” says Evans. “Again and again,
characters find that they can never fully escape their histories.”
One boundary that Evans sees as sacred is the line between
truth and fiction. Though she has undergraduate degrees in
anthropology and African American studies, Evans chose to
become a fiction writer because, as she explains it, she has too
much respect for the truth.
“I loved studying anthropology because it opened up the way I
think about people and the world,” she says. When reading interviews
and historical documents, however, she found herself frustrated.
“As an anthropologist, I had to observe and report events exactly
as they happened, but I often thought that I could tell a better story.”
Rather than risk embellishing the truth, Evans turned to fiction.
Of course, her stories are not pure invention. Bits and
pieces of the author’s own life have found their way into her
writing. Asked whether she is afraid that people she knows will
recognize themselves in her characters, however, Evans laughs.
“People are only right about 50 percent of the time, and as
long as you don’t tell them which 50 percent, they’ll never know.”
While her anthropology studies led Evans to think about the di-
public affairs. In their critique of the
modern system of higher education
in the United States, the authors
point to oversized bureaucracies and
unreasonable tuition costs (Times
Books, $26).
the lucky ones: one family and
the Extraordinary invention of
chinese america by Mae Ngai, the
Lung Family Professor of Asian
American Studies and professor of
history. Ngai’s multigenerational
history of the Tapes, a Chinese
family that immigrated to the United
States during the 18th century,
offers insight into the challenges of
integration and the complexities of
the immigrant identity (Houghton
Mifflin Harcourt, $26).
B y gr a c e La i d L a W ’11
PHOTO: COuRTEsY PENGuIN
NOvEMBER/DECEMBER 2010
33
vide between truth and fiction, other classes shaped
the way she thought about writing. Columbia marked
Evans’ first real exposure to contemporary literature,
and she recalls being particularly inspired by Junot
Díaz’s use of vernacular and Toni Morrison’s complex
narrative structure. Evans also credits Morrison with
proving to her that the topics she was most interested
in writing about — including African-American culture
and female relationships — were worthy subjects for
literary exploration. “I think I needed to read her before
I could give myself permission to write,” Evans says.
Evans’ father is a College alumnus and her mother
a Barnard alumna, and Evans initially was reluctant
to follow them to Morningside Heights. “There was
just so much history there,” Evans says. “I didn’t
want to feel like I was copying their example.” Her
parents had to bully her into visiting the campus;
once she did, she was enamored.
Evans made the most of her Columbia experience,
becoming head of the Pan African House and political
secretary of the Black Students’ Organization, among
other activities. She also wrote a weekly opinion
column, “(Re)-Education,” for Spectator. Along with
her two majors, Evans pursued a creative writing
track. She says she especially enjoyed classes with
Colin Harrison and Victor LaValle. In fact, several of
the stories in Evans’ book began as assignments for
undergraduate writing courses.
Given that she’s been revising some of her stories since college,
it is perhaps not surprising that Evans feels more than ready
to move on to her next project. “It’s like I just got engaged, and
everyone keeps talking about my ex-boyfriend,” she says. She is
working on a novel, tentatively titled The Empire Has No Clothes,
about a young woman who is asked to rewrite a history textbook
for a progressive charter school.
Though many of the stylistic elements that define her first
book will reappear in this next work, Evans says the project will
be something of a departure for her. “Writing a novel forced me
to think about structure in a new way,” she says. The story has
been especially challenging to construct, Evans says, because
large chunks of it are set in the past. Beyond these details, she
refuses to reveal too much about her latest work, but she does
promise an engaging read.
“It’s been a lot of fun to write,” Evans says. “The characters
get up to all sorts of shenanigans.”
Grace Laidlaw ’11 is majoring in creative writing and psychology.
She is director of Columbia’s peer counseling hotline and
contributes regularly to CCT.
crisis on campus: a bold plan for
reforming our colleges and universities
by Mark C. Taylor, professor
and department chair of religion.
Taylor identifies flaws in the current
American university system and
proposes an alternative model that
privileges teaching over research
and places greater emphasis on interdisciplinary
study (Knopf, $24).
the isle of Monte cristo: finding
the inner treasure by S.T.
Georgiou. Georgiou’s reflections
on Christian theology are inspired
by the writings of poets and close
friends Thomas Merton ’38 and
Robert Lax ’38 (Novalis Publishing,
$19.95).
Grace Laidlaw ’11