'Oreo': Fran Ross' rediscovered 1974 Philly novel

Oreo

By Fran Ross

New Directions,

230 pp. $14.95

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Reviewed by Stephen Klinge

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Christine Clark, the heroine of Fran Ross' outrageously funny novel Oreo, creates a form of self-defense she calls the Way of the Interstitial Thrust, or WIT. "WIT was based on an Oriental dedication to attacking the body's soft, vulnerable spaces or, au fond, to making such spaces, or interstices, where previously none had existed." Christine, nicknamed Oreo, is born to a black mother and a white Jewish father who soon abandons his family. She grows up in Philadelphia and learns to use WIT, and wit, as weapons against sexism, racism, and general ignorance in this brilliant, code-switching satire.

First published to little notice in 1974, rediscovered in 2000, and now newly reissued, Oreo is sui generis: It creates a space where none had existed. It's a feminist picaresque that blends African American vernacular, Yiddish, standard English, Greek, and Latin. It incorporates mathematical equations, menus, lists, diagrams, and charts. It riffs on the Greek quest-myth of Theseus. It relishes puns both cerebral and bawdy.

Some of Ross' polymath narrative techniques bring to mind the postmodern novels of Thomas Pynchon and John Barth. And Oreo's mythological subtext and verbal dexterity recall James Joyce's Ulysses. But its satirical treatment of race and sexism make Oreo unique.

Though its humor sometimes crosses the line of contemporary political correctness, Oreo seems very much a novel of our time, interested in fluid conceptions of culture, identity, and languages. Most of all, it crackles with raucous, disruptive wit.

Born in Philly in 1935, Fran Ross graduated from the then-predominantly white Overbrook High and Temple University before relocating to New York to work as a journalist, proofreader, and copy editor. After the publication of Oreo, Ross briefly moved to Los Angeles to write for comedian Richard Pryor and his ill-fated NBC television show before returning to the New York publishing world. She died in 1985.

Oreo is full of local color. Oreo's mother lists "Advantages of Philadelphia Over New York" and "Things I Miss About Philadelphia That Are Long Gone." The 14-year-old Oreo looks for a job by putting a "Situations Wanted" listing in The Inquirer (which prompts a dirty phone call from a man whom she skillfully humiliates). Oreo's favorite sandals have "two simple crosspieces representing Chestnut and Market Streets, which don't cross."

The novel is a challenge to summarize. Its chapters - often with Greek titles that allude to the Theseus myth - are divided into short anecdotes, many of which read like a stand-up comic's elaborate set-up for a punch line. The plot is full of detours and diversions, but its central story traces the life of Oreo from her youth in Philly through her coming-of-age quest to New York City to discover the secret of her birth.

The novel's epigraph defines oreo as "Someone who is black on the outside and white on the inside," but it follows that with "Epigraphs have nothing to do with the book." Oreo, whose nickname derives from a mishearing of "oriole," is less an outsider than a multicultural insider, capable of subverting tutors, pimps, family, and friends alike.

Using WIT's faux-Asian vocabulary, Ross describes Oreo's defining battle in terms that apply to the novel: "sarcastic blos from hed to to, the irony of a fut in the mouth, facetious wise-kracs, kik-y repartee, strik-ing satire."

A superarticulate quick-change artist, Oreo herself is a beautiful young woman with an eye-catching Afro, a bad-ass avenger whose motto is Nemo me impune lacessit ("No one attacks me with impunity"). She's "one pushy chick" and one smart cookie, and Oreo is one smart, funny novel.