American author Gayl Jones is powering into her eighth decade with a new novel only a year after the publication of her epic tale of slavery in Brazil, Palmares, which itself appeared after a 20-year hiatus. While briefer and lighter in tone, The Birdcatcher has grim moments. An offstage character mutilates her genitals with the mirror from a compact, and Catherine, the sculptor at the heart of the novel, continually tries to kill her beloved husband, Ernest. Without the constant vigilance of the novel’s narrator, Amanda, she would succeed.
As a meditation on female creativity, it forms a fascinating bookend to Jones’s debut, the bruising Corregidora. Published in 1975 when she was in her mid-20s, that novel centres on Ursa, a 1940s blues singer brutalised and exploited by her partners, while bearing the historic burden of slavery in the form of horror stories handed down through the generations. (Corregidora is the name of Ursa’s despised ancestor, a Portuguese slave owner who raped not only his slaves but the children he fathered on them.)
