Frannie is a teacher. Her days are spent educating college-aged youths about language, its usages, writing, and the virtues of slang. In most respects, her life is ordinary -- she's divorced, single, and when she's not teaching, she dedicates herself to creating a dictionary of street slang. One night, Frannie is out at a bar, and sees something she isn't supposed to: an intimate moment between a man and a woman. Shaken and strangely enthralled, her world is turned upside down as a vicious serial killer stalks the streets of her neighborhood, and as she grows closer to one of the police officers working the case, Frannie realizes that the murders might be even closer to home than she thinks.
Adapted into a film that, at the time, was reviled by critics, In the Cut is an unapologetic look into gender-based violence, women's sexuality, and the often painful intersection of the two. At the time of its publication in 1995, it was considered slightly shocking, perhaps not so much because of its graphic sex scenes, but because of its frank and brutal insight into patriarchy. It's been on my list for a long time; I learned of the book first, and then later, saw bits and pieces of the film, enough to intrigue me to pick it up. Having finally gotten around to it, I'm left with mixed feelings on both its message and its impact.
To begin with, our protagonist, Frannie, is interesting. We're having a bit of an unlikable female character revolution right now -- the books of Moshfegh, Taddeo and Flynn come to mind -- and I think Frannie fits nicely into the category, although she might be considered more sympathetic than many of the darker, crueler characters who populate it. In spite of the dark, occasionally violent desires she harbors (mainly with regards to sex and men), she refreshingly exists somewhere between the Madonna/Whore dichotomy, prone both to prudishness and candor. Her romantic interest (if he can be called that) is Detective Malloy, a figure who represents the unsavory aspects of herself that Frannie seeks to suppress.
Malloy is both Frannie's mirror and her opposite: she, in her austerity, is attracted to his crude and vulgar way of speaking and acting. With him, she opens up to a side of herself that she wasn't aware existed in the first place. Truthfully, that's about as far as I'm able to understand why Frannie keeps coming back to him -- it doesn't shock me that a woman might keep returning to man who is brutish or provides a way for her to self-destruct, but it's his casual homophobia, sexism and racism that makes it baffling to me. It's interesting: Frannie thinks of herself as a feminist, someone openminded, and yet she never makes any effort either to question or challenge Malloy's biases. I'm not really sure why Moore felt the need to include it, let alone allow it to pass by without any introspection from Frannie.
Frannie's most interesting relationship is actually with Cornelius, one of her students, a young Black man who has a fascinating and complex way of using language that draws Frannie in. He ends up being underutilized; I often questioned why he was included in the first place, since in the end, he's brushed off without much fanfare. Her friendship with Pauline, too, is intriguing -- I wished there was a bit more of her, this woman who "dates married men because she wants to be alone on the holidays."
As for Moore's unraveling of patriarchal desire (and how women are dictated by men in every aspect of their lives), I thought it was good, but perhaps not as revelatory as it must've been in '95. Nonetheless, I think many feminists will find it to be a thought-provoking piece of literature, and I particularly enjoyed the way that Moore combines the erotic with the violent, the sexual with the grotesque. These things go hand-in-hand more often than we'd like to admit, and Moore excels at making her story engrossing in its repulsiveness.
Would I recommend it? That's a tough one. Once again, if you're interested in feminist literature, I think it's worth a go (especially when it comes to the misogyny of the '90s), but overall, there was something a touch unsatisfying about it. The strangely unchallenged racism, which I personally don't think Moore was equipped to handle in a fulfilling way, is the main reason why this book couldn't rise above the three star mark for me.
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