If you didn’t know any better, you might think that Fran Ross’ Oreo was a brand new hip novel from a humorist with a brilliant future ahead of her. It’s intellectual and witty and funny as hell. Yet Fran Ross (1935-1985) wrote and published this gem in 1974, her one and only novel newly reissued by New Directions Publishing. Her views on race and women’s rights are timeless; setting up her story as a modern day version of the myth of Theseus (and the Minotaur and the labyrinth) is singular and brilliant. Ross had me Googling that myth and a whole lot of amazing vocabulary, but the story stands on its own as an engaging and delightful tale, full of surprises, whether or not you’re familiar with the Greek myth.
Our protagonist is a 14 year-old biracial young woman named Christine Schwartz, aka Oreo. In part one of the novel, entitled “Troezen” (the Greek city from which Theseus haled), we meet Oreo, her family, and the Philadelphia neighborhood that formed her. From her African American mother Helen, Oreo inherits her powers of observation and analysis. From her Jewish American father Sam, she inherits the ability to bullshit and a colorful Yiddish vocabulary. The marriage of Helen and Sam caused Sam’s racist mother to drop dead of a coronary and Helen’s antisemitic father to “turn to stone” in his chair, …his body a rigid half swastika…. After Oreo’s younger brother Moishe (aka Jimmie C.) is born, Sam and Helen split up. Sam never returns to the family and Helen eventually takes off on her own journey, sending occasional letters from the road while Oreo and Jimmie live with Helen’s mother Louise. Jimmie, like an oracle but with nothing important to say,
… had inherited his mother’s sweet voice, and he was given to making mysterious, sometimes asinine pronouncements, which he often sang.
Louise has a way with words herself, inadvertently giving her granddaughter the nickname Oreo, but is renowned for her amazing powers of cookery, which will be referenced several times in the story.
Oreo’s childhood education was unorthodox. Rather than attend school, tutors such as Milton the Milkman, Professor Lindau (“renowned linguist and blood donor”), and a fellow named Douglas Floors came to her home. Ross’ descriptions of these men and their “lessons” are a small part of the novel, but stood out for me for their humor. For example, Douglas Floors hated nature so much that he changed his last name from Flowers to Floors.
He once told Oreo that he had offered to look after a friend’s pachysandra over the weekend, an offer that was hastily withdrawn when he learned that pachysandra was a plant and not an elephant seer whom no one believed.
Oreo’s most important lessons, however, came through her mother’s letters. A letter on the oppression of women had great impact on her, leading Oreo to develop a motto (Nemo me impune lacessit or “no one attacks me with impunity”) and a form of self defense called WIT, or the Way of the Interstitial Thrust. This attitude and those moves are going to serve Oreo well on her own journey, which begins after Helen returns to Philadelphia. She has returned because she sees that it’s time for Oreo to start her own quest in search of her father and the truth about her origins. Through Helen, Sam has left for Oreo a mysterious list which will lead her to him and the great secret.
Part two of the novel, entitled “Meandering,” is the story of Oreo’s quest through the labyrinth of New York City, its subways, and its more unusual denizens to find her father and the secret. There are too many characters to mention, but the story of Parnell the Pimp is my favorite. Suffice it to say that the 14-year-old feminist puts the pimp in his place in front of his 10 prostitutes and defends herself with the most amazing shield any hero, Greek or otherwise, has ever wielded. Eventually, Oreo does find her father, which sets her off on another mini-quest. The “secret” of Oreo’s birth is probably less shocking today than it was 40 years ago, but Ross makes it fit more or less with the myth, and Oreo is empowered and girding herself for further adventure when we leave her.
Fran Ross’ writing style and her way with words is insanely good — she writes like her character Louise cooks:
Five people in the neighborhood went insane from the bouquets that wafted to them from Louise’s kitchen. The tongues of two men macerated in the overload from their salivary glands. Three men and a woman had to be chained up by their families when they began gnawing at a quincaillerie of substances that wiser heads have found to be inedible.
Ross combines classicism and funkiness, high brow and low brow. Her vocabulary, which includes what we used to call “twenty-five cent words,” Yiddish, and words of her own construction, is breathtaking. I especially enjoyed Ross’ ability to turn proper nouns (Schwinn, Freidan, Ku Klux Klan) into verbs. For example, a 14 year-old boy who had enough bikes to start his own shop was found “schwinned to death”.
I’m sorry Fran Ross didn’t receive enough positive critical attention in her short life to give us more of her imaginative and creative prose. She apparently was hired to be a writer for Richard Pryor when he was offered a TV show, but that never worked out. Again, what a loss. This woman should have been writing for SNL. Still we have her brilliant Oreo, a hero for the ages. She’s the woman you want to raise your daughter to be: intelligent, confident, fearless, funny, and able to open a can of whoop ass as needed.
