Push

Alfred A. Knopf

Review published August 1996

If nothing else, Sapphire's first book, Push, will bother you.

Reading the life story of a 16-year-old who has survived incest, had two babies, and is infected with HIV will make you edgy, bitter, and sad. Sapphire's depiction of the educational, welfare, and health care situation in contemporary urban America will summon up intense anger (and guilt for those of us who are economically privileged).

The simplistic, raw language informing the novel's landscape will fully engage all of your senses -- you will hear, feel, and smell the painful and unforgiving world  at the center of Precious Jones' (the book's protagonist and narrator) existence.

What Push won't do, however, is make you understand this world, Precious Jones, or the meaning of her life.

For one thing, it's too short to adequately explore the complex subject matter. Only 179 pages in length, much of which is poems and journal entries, Sapphire does not really have a chance to yield new insights on AIDS, incest, sisterhood, black/white relations, or any of Push's other equally compelling themes.

Through the course of the book, we learn that Precious has been sexually abused by both her mother and father, but we don't have any idea what prompted them to do this to their daughter. We don't even get a glimpse into the parents' characters -- they are both presented as inherently depraved people whose only motivation in life is perpetuating fear and pain.

Incest has many complicated and overlapping causes, and Push would have much more resonance if it examined these aspects instead of merely representing the parents as immutable evildoers. While Push asks the question, "How does a victim of sexual abuse rebel against malevolent family members?" a work like Toni Morrison's The Bluest Eye takes a more compelling approach: "How does a victim of sexual abuse rebel when her abuser is as abused (in other ways) as she is?"

One of the book's greatest strengths is its basic, oftentimes shocking, language. Push is a celebration of language -- a demonstration of its capacity for change. Throughout the course of the novel, Precious moves from illiterate girl to very literate poet, from a girl with no self-esteem to one who dreams of supporting her children through writing. Since the story is told from the first-person point-of-view, this transformation is both real and powerful because the reader experiences her progress first-hand. However, by achieving this intimacy between protagonist and reader, Sapphire sacrifices an essential component of the story: perspective.

We see Precious come to love writing and reading, and cultivate new self-respect, but we don't really understand why. Precious connects with her new teacher Ms. Rain, but Sapphire doesn't explore what elicits this connection. At the end of the book, Precious finally stands up to her mother, but we don't understand what moves her to do this. Push might be more cohesive if Sapphire, a performance poet, had spent less time on language and more time on character development.

Push is a novel of extremes -- the extreme beauty of language, the extreme pain of modern-day urban experience, and an extreme lack of understanding that we are left with after reading it.

Katherine Anne Porter once said: "Human life itself may be almost pure chaos, but the work of the artist is to take these handfuls of confusion and disparate things, things that seem irreconcilable, and put them together in a frame to give them some kind of shape and meaning." Sapphire would do well to take her advice.