Sheena Patel’s I’M A FAN (Graywolf, 203 pp., paperback, $17) is an impolite novel about romantic obsession, set in a liberalized but inequitable sexual economy that rewards the white and rich.
The unnamed narrator, a young brown woman living in London, spends much of the book online, fixating on the white, married and much older “man I want to be with” and the other women in his life.
She rails and seethes and then regrets the railing and seething, bringing her no closer to the object of her obsession.
She kisses a girl and likes it, though not enough to override her interest in acquiring male approval.
Meanwhile she derides the ways in which her lover’s other lovers perform antiracism in corny, confused ways: “privileged white women talking about care of the Earth and the land as if they are distinct from the white people who are racist and those who have pillaged this burning, now volatile planet of ours.”
Persons:
Sheena Patel’s, I’ve, ’, “
Locations:
London
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