Passing Strange: A Novel

By Sally Macleod

Claudia had the misfortune to be born with an ugly face. Growing up in a modest, loving Vermont family, she painfully learned to compensate for her looks in other ways-ways that led to a good marriage... This description may be from another edition of this product.

• Format: Hardcover
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0375506136
• ISBN13: 9780375506130
• Release Date: June 2002
• Publisher: Random House Publishing Group
• Length: 320 Pages
• Weight: 0.95 lbs.
• Dimensions: 8.5" x 1.1" x 5.8"

Customer Reviews

A novel filled with great characters

...and I should say a terrific use of time and space. I read this book this summer on the recommendation of a friend and I am now a certified Macleod fan. Claudia's turmoil and struggle with her inner self (what she sees in the mirror is not what or who she is inside) is handling perfectly by Macleod. The strangely narcissitic character of Dan, her husband is a well rounded study in matching image and human nature. When Claudia meets her black gardener after moving to the South, I feel that's when the story becomes even more interesting....a very enlightening read and compelling tale of society and its thoughts and judgements on everything from beauty to race.

Definitions of beauty, insights into the South

I read this novel during the week following the 2004 elections, a particularly opportune time to seek to understand the Southern United States. Similarly to the narrator (and author), I was born and raised in Washington State (she's from Vermont). Although of course there is racism here, it's not as in your face as it is elsewhere. My sister married an African man, and I think all four of us girls dated black men and I don't remember ever hearing a word about it. Even in the late Sixties, in Seattle's Central District (where black people lived)I felt comfortable visiting Black Panther friends in the middle of the night. Later I married a Southerner, and my visits to the South astounded me as much as they astounded Claudia, the anti-heroine in this novel. Ms. Macleod's dual themes of female beauty and racism are complex and intriguing. I was thinking she could get herself into some trouble with the cliche of the beautiful white woman more attracted to the first black man she meets than to her rather oafish husband. Calvin, the black man, doesn't come alive for me, nor does Dan, the anti-heroine's husband. I never believed in the marriage. As an earlier reviewer observed, the ending of the book is rather shocking and unexpected and perhaps too easy of a way out for the plotline. I felt ambivalent about Claudia until I read Macleod's own description of Claudia as an anti-heroine. Claudia is at first sympathetic. Being imperfect by white society's terms tortures people (see Story of a Face), particularly women. I do not think it quite fit to compare the many ways black people can look with one white and wealthy woman's problems with looks. Nonetheless, I loved the novel. It is very complex. Some of the writing--most of it--is wonderful. Macleod dares to explore subjects that have been mostly taboo. I left the book sitting beside my computer so I could google around for other people's insights. The best are from the author herself, published in an on-line journal called 3 am. Someone from the magazine interviews Macleod in depth about her novel and exactly what she did mean to convey.

Clever twist, engaging voice

I love debut novels, the books that took years to write, that have the culmination of the best ideas a writer has saved for a decade or a lifetime. Because it isn't long before the publisher asks them to squeeze out a book a year and the writing gets bland. In that capacity, I loved Passing Strange, a superb debut novel.Strange is the story a young woman blessed with a perfect body and a highly imperfect face. Her body has enough to draw the eye of a young socialite who convinces her to marry him-and get plastic surgery post-marriage. But once she agrees and she has the face to match the body, her world changes and she begins to views others (specifically the black community near and within her home) as the disenfranchised group to which she used to belong. The story moves and is written with a beautiful and clever voice in our narrator.The only place the book came up short, which is why I only gave it four stars, is the ending. I almost feel that Sally MacLeod had started writing the book but forgot how she would end it. The story goes down a path and gets stuck there (the murder of her husband) and seems to abandon the writing and voice of the earlier chapters.That said, it is still worth a read, and worth a purchase. This is an excellent debut novel overall and I will be keeping my eye on her next novel.

From New Fiction Review

This is not just a brave first novel, it is a brave novel full-stop. An atmosphere of foreboding and regret pervades Claudia's recollections from the opening page. As she reveals her past, with particular emphasis on a childhood fraught with the cruelty inflicted upon a "plain" girl, we are engaged by Claudia's quirky disposition and maneuvering intelligence. Growing up in Vermont, Claudia makes her uneasy passage from yearning adolescent to young woman with the help of one undeniable asset: she has been blessed with a beautiful body. Eventually, she snares the object of her longing, a feckless rich kid from Manhattan. Against all odds, she and Dan Dryburgh marry. Dan's mother Ping, a classic of her kind, decides the ugly duckling must be transformed if the young couple are to have the perfect life she imagines. Claudia, to Dan's great relief, acquiesces to cosmetic surgery. For Claudia, it is a lonely experience. When Dan's employer offers him a better position in North Carolina, he and Claudia decide to leave the past behind. But, as events unfold in the sleepy southern town, Claudia finds it difficult to shake off the years of unkindness, while Dan revels in a new found sense of superiority. At this point, although the book has been fascinating - MacLeod's vision of the American south is astonishingly fresh - it now takes on a darkly disturbing dimension. Claudia, sensitive to the subtly racist attitudes of her charming new friends, is compelled to explore the shunned world of black sensibility. As she herself once was, her black acquaintances are too often treated with kindly disdain. What Claudia reveals we instinctively know to be true and it is indeed unsettling. The embodiment of these melancholy revelations appears in the form of the inscrutably knowing Calvin Moore. As Claudia and Calvin are drawn together, we sense the dire complications to come. Their intimacy is mesmerizing. Predictably, the lovers' fate hinges on murder. But MacLeod brilliantly resists all the cliches. With assuredness, she obliges us to marvel at a society that insists on maintaining such a vast paint-box of grotesquely arbitrary legal procedures. A stunning modern tragedy - wrenching, but not without its tender rewards.