HILTON ALS, WHITE GIRLS (2013)

In a world where we are so often reduced to one essential self, Hilton Als’
breathtaking book of critical essays, White Girls, which meditates on the
ways he and other subjects read, project and absorb parts of white femininity,
is a radically liberating book. It’s one of the only works of critical thinking
that doesn’t ask the reader, its author or anyone he writes about to stoop
before the doorframe of complete legibility before entering. Something he
also permitted the subjects and readers of his first book, the glorious book-
length essay, The Women, a series of riffs and psychological portraits of
Dorothy Dean, Owen Dodson, and the author’s own mother, among others.
One of the shifts of that book, uncommon at the time, was how it
acknowledges the way we inhabit bodies made up of variously gendered
influences. To read White Girls now is to experience the utter freedom of this
gift and to marvel at Als’ tremendous versatility and intelligence.
He is easily the most diversely talented American critic alive. He can write
into genres like pop music and film where being part of an audience is a
fantasy happening in the dark. He’s also wired enough to know how the art
world builds reputations on the nod of rich white patrons, a significant
collision in a time when Jean-Michel Basquiat is America’s most expensive
modern artist. Als’ swerving and always moving grip on performance means
he’s especially good on describing the effect of art which is volatile and
unstable and built on the mingling of made-up concepts and the hard fact of
their effect on behavior, such as race. Writing on Flannery O’Connor for
instance he alone puts a finger on her “uneasy and unavoidable union
between black and white, the sacred and the profane, the shit and the stars.”
From Eminem to Richard Pryor, André Leon Talley to Michael Jackson, Als
enters the life and work of numerous artists here who turn the fascinations of
race and with whiteness into fury and song and describes the complexity of
their beauty like his life depended upon it. There are also brief memoirs here
that will stop your heart. This is an essential work to understanding American
culture. –John Freeman, Executive Editor