In the foreword to the edition of Oreo that I read, Danzy Senna calls the book a “hilarious badass novel,” and yeah, that sums it up pretty nicely (xi). Oreo is a satirical picaresque quest-narrative, with the protagonist (a half-black/half-Jewish precocious teenage girl called Oreo) playing the part of Theseus. It’s a very smart book and a very funny book, from the epigraphs page (which includes the disclaimer that epigraphs “never have anything to do with the book”) to the “Key for Speed Readers, Nonclassicists, Etc.” at the end of the book (which recaps the Theseus myth and makes it clear which of the characters/scenarios Oreo encounters correspond to which parts of Theseus’s story).
So, right, the plot. Oreo’s parents, Helen and Samuel, get married despite the fact that she’s black and he’s Jewish and both their families disapprove. They get divorced when Oreo is very young and Helen is pregnant with their second child. Oreo and her brother, Jimmie C., are raised by their maternal grandmother: Helen is a traveling musician, and Samuel isn’t part of their lives at all. But Oreo is told that there’s a secret about her birth that she’ll need to discover when it’s time. When she’s a teenager, it’s time, and she sets out from Philadelphia to New York to find her father and learn the secret.
But the plot isn’t what’s really great about this book, though it is really satisfying in its shape, in the way that it fits with the Theseus story. What’s really great about this book is its form and humor and language. There are shorter named sections within each chapter, and these named sections contain everything from straight prose to diagrams to lists to letters to equations. It’s quirky and funny, with passages like this:
A word about weather: There is no weather per se in this book. Passing reference is made to weather in a few instances. Assume whatever season you like throughout. Summer makes the most sense in a book of this length. That way, pages do not have to be used up describing people taking off and putting on overcoats.(5)
Or this, about Oreo:
she had her mother’s love of words, their nuance and precision, their rock and wry. When told at an early age that she would one day have to seek out her father to learn the secret of her birth, she said, “I am going to find that motherfucker.” In her view, the last word was merely le mot juste(37)
There are so many funny set pieces I can’t even begin to describe or quote from all the ones I like, but some highlights for me included a letter from Oreo’s mom to her and her brother about the time she had a job filling in dyeless spots on a faulty shipment of dresses, a whole bit about Oreo’s tutors, and the part where Oreo realizes she forgot to bring the gift she was planning to give her father, which is a plaster of Paris cast of his son’s uncircumcised penis.
Not that it’s all humor. As Harryette Mullen puts it in her afterword, “Oreo is a character whose linguistic and cultural competence allows her to travel between two distinct minority cultures, while enjoying the resources of the dominant culture and exploring her own identity” (215). Like Danzy Senna said: badass.
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