WHITEGIRL

Manning’s flawed but compelling debut is not about O.J. and Nicole, despite some obvious similarities in this story of a disintegrating interracial marriage between a handsome athlete/sportscaster/movie star and his wife.

After an unfortunate first chapter in which Charlotte Robicheaux, recovering from a vicious attack for which authorities have arrested her husband Milo, ruminates obsessively about race and love with pretentious metaphors, Manning retraces the Robicheaux marriage from its romantic beginnings up to the fateful night when Milo may or may not have cut his wife’s throat. Charlotte, a classic California blond, is attending college in Vermont when she first notices Milo, a star on the college ski team, where he is the only black. After her affair with one of Milo’s teammates goes bad, Charlotte leaves school and becomes a well-known fashion model. Meanwhile, Milo wins a slew of Olympic medals. Crossing paths in New York, the two act on the mutual attraction that was left unspoken five years earlier. Manning is masterful at developing the relationship, its normal uncertainties heightened by issues of race and fame. Milo in particular is a riveting, complex character; his upbringing by fiercely loving and intellectually ambitious parents in an otherwise white New Hampshire community has made him a charismatic loner who trusts no one but his family. Charlotte and he strive to make their marriage work, and they adore their baby daughter. But Charlotte, who offers too many examples of her ignorance about the world to be believable in her perceptive-narrator role, makes some glaring blunders on the race front just as Milo falls under the sway of an agent whose espousal of black empowerment includes thinly veiled antagonism toward Charlotte. As liquor-tinged jealousy worms its ways into both their hearts, trust disintegrates. . . .

Too much self-analysis by whiny Charlotte, but an engagingly provocative page-turner.