Recent Reading: Outlawed

A couple of days ago, I finished Anna North's gender bending post-apocalyptic Western, Outlawed.

The book is a little out of the mainstream, starting with the cover. On LitHub, Emily Temple named it one of the best book covers of the month when it was published (January 2021).

I mean, how can you not love it? The cheeky western-but-make-it-pink type treatment, the floating clouds, the cut out face, the lips! The lips, you guys. This is probably the cover that gives me the most plain joy this month.

I read the book in ebook and audiobook form. In some ways, I regret that I did not read a hardcover because I liked the cover so much. But my public library had a kindle version available before I was able to check out a print copy. 

But back to that cover. 

There is something Mona Lisa like, or maybe René Magritte like about that face that is simultaneously a woman's face but also, obviously, an artifact that does not really look like any woman's face. I saw that they had the book at my local Target store and I do admit to spending several minutes picking up and staring at the cover. Oddly fascinating.

I went back and forth trying to think of how to summarize Outlawed, and even wondering if I even needed to. I decided to borrow Maureen Corrigan's summary from her NPR Fresh Air review:

Outlawed opens in an alternative America of 1894 that was torn asunder by a flu epidemic some 60 years earlier. West of the Mississippi, centralized government has been replaced by a patchwork of Independent Towns. One of the few things this fragmented America agrees on is that women are put on Earth to bear children. That's it. And, because too much knowledge, especially medical knowledge of women's bodies, is frowned upon, "barren" women are regarded as freaks of nature, witches; they're ostracized, imprisoned and sometimes put to death.

That status quo is pretty much OK with the heroine of Outlawed, a 17-year-old woman named Ada. She's content to be married off to a man chosen for her and settles in to await her first pregnancy — which fails to happen. In less than a year, Ada is expelled from her husband's house and, after a few twists of fate, joins up with the infamous Hole in the Wall Gang.

As Corrigan notes, within the world of Outlawed, Ada is deemed a useless woman because she can not bear children. (This point is the reason some interested in issues of gender and sexuality might be attracted to the book; I am not sure that people who come to the public library looking for a Western similar to the last one by Loren Estleman or Louis L'Amour they just read will be as interested.) The members of the Hole in the Wall Gang -- which includes both childless women and gay men --have a different idea of their importance to the world:

We may be barren in body, dear Doctor, but we shall be fathers of many nations, fathers and mothers both. You see, when we found this land, I knew it was promised not just for us, but for the descendants of our minds and hearts, all those cast out of their homes and banished by their families, all those slandered and maligned, imprisoned and abused, for no crime but that God saw fit not to plant children in their wombs. I knew that we would be not barren women, but kings (location 1283-1287).

After she realizes that she can not bear children, Ada begins to question whether there can still be sexual desire and satisfaction outside of the possibility of pregnancy and childbirth. (The other members of the Hole in the Wall Gang call Ada Doc because she learned to be a midwife from her mother.)

"Do you like men, Doc?"

I had not given the question any thought. Watching Cassie and Elzy had made me wonder if I might at some point come to like a woman, but since I felt no stirrings of attraction toward any of the women at Hole in the Wall -- and understood that they would not be welcomed if I did -- I had spent only a small amount of time considering the matter. Whether or not I liked men seemed unworthy even of that small consideration, since not liking men had never been presented to me as an option. Still, I could remember craving my husband at the beginning of our marriage; I could remember wanting him so badly I felt a pain between my legs. And I could remember boys in school -- and, if I was honest, Lark too -- from whom I could not look away, whose faces or backs or muscled legs I saw when I closed my eyes.

"I suppose so," I said, staring at Amity's back (location 1726-1734).

Yes there is a considerable amount of material in North's novel about gender. However, I would say that the majority of the book has the plot of a fairly typical Western. There is a good amount of space devoted to Ada learning how to shoot a gun. And the biggest plot point is planning for and executing a bank robbery. I thought the story hummed along quite well.

Overall, I liked this book and think it was a fun way to think about gender issues. If the book has a flaw, I think it goes too far when it tries to also tackle race. One hypothesis some people in the story have to explain a woman's inability to become pregnant is misceganation. As one character, supposedly a physician says:

According to my research, nearly half of all cases of barrenness are caused by some form of racial mixing or another, sometimes quite far back in the family tree. And of course this is far from the only ailment (location 2406-2410).

So that is Outlawed.

In addition to writing novels, North is also a reporter for Vox. In her profile she says:

I cover gender issues: reproductive rights, workplace discrimination, LGBTQ rights, masculinity, femininity, and more.

One of her most recent articles is about the impossible challenge many mothers have in trying to work and be a mother to children in virtual school at the same time.

Stories like this — about moms trying to manage everything during a seemingly endless public health crisis — have prompted many necessary conversations about America’s failure to invest in child care and the stubborn gender inequity in many American families. But there’s another issue that the pandemic has laid bare perhaps more starkly than ever before: the problem of work.

I recommend the article.