There are protocols, expectations, professional negotiators to consult. Haiti is a country of “startling contrasts,” Gay writes, “so much beauty, so much brutality.” It is also, one character notes, the kidnapping capital of the world. If we consume such images of sexual violence, does it amount somehow to tacit approval? We want to look away, as in the movies, but it’s impossible to read with our eyes closed. The highly detailed brutality Mireille endures haunts us long after the book ends. Even the reader is made complicit as the ordeal stretches into nearly a fortnight. This hopelessness and silent complicity also defines the reaction of Mireille’s family. Neighbors and passers-by cluster around but do nothing. Her husband, an American “blan,” as he is known in the Haitian dialect for whites, looks on helplessly as she is pulled from their car and whisked away by armed men driving black S.U.V.s, while their toddler cries in the back seat. The kidnapping of this narrator, Mireille Duval Jameson, American-born daughter of a wealthy Haitian construction magnate, takes place in Port-au-Prince in broad daylight, just outside the gate of her family’s walled mansion. ” The rest of the passage cuts to the crux: “I was kidnapped by a gang of fearless yet terrified young men with so much impossible hope beating inside their bodies it burned their very skin. She reveals her literary intent in her first sentence, which begins: “Once upon a time, in a far-off land. Roxane Gay’s striking debut novel, “An Untamed State,” is a fairy tale in this vein, its complex and fragile moral arrived at through great pain and high cost.Īn assistant professor of English at Eastern Illinois University, Gay is also the author of a collection, “Ayiti,” and a frequent contributor to Salon and The Rumpus. We’d rather forget that a passing stranger raped Sleeping Beauty as she lay unconscious, or that Snow White’s jealous stepmother not only called for her death but wanted to eat her liver and lungs. We remember the princess and the happy ending. Contemporary tellings tend to mask the real horrors of the original Brothers Grimm stories and their ilk.