The Coldest Winter Ever (1999)
350pp, Fiction
Notes
2020-02-10
When I found out that Sister Souljah of Public Enemy and being condemned by Bill Clinton fame had written some books I was immediately up for reading them (or one of them atleast, let’s not get ahead of ourselves).
So I read The Coldest Winter Ever. The novel follows Winter, the daughter of a Brooklyn drug kingpin whose empire topples and who is subsequently sent to prison leaving his family to survive (or not) on the streets. For a novel not written between the years 1837-1901 it’s a very Victorian book, highly moralistic and (occasionally overbearingly) didactic (do we really need an in depth analysis of each of the characters’ flaws and symbolic resonances at the end of the book? – apparently yes).
Souljah inserts herself prominently in the narrative, for a while I was thinking her character was going to learn some kind of lesson about not being so sanctimonious, but no! She fully commits to it, the fictional Souljah is more or less flawless and always proved right by events. Winter on the other hand is always wrong though likewise never learns anything. All that aside though this is an enjoyable book, the moralising is all to good end and effect. It’s real strength is in Winter’s distinct voice which is never less than 100% believable.
Other pros: I kind of loved the fact that no one learns anything or improves themselves over the course of the book (its sort of hilarious how closed the characters are by the end) and Souljah’s diagnosis of the social ills afflicting Black Americans seems to me spot on and given the passage of 20 years since this book was published depressingly fixed.
Cons: The judgemental tone is sometimes hard to take. There’s one sentence description of Winter, as a 12 yr old, losing her virginity which is utterly brutal. There’s a kind of simmering homophobia running through the book, not purely in the voice of the characters but it seemed to me more embedded than that, I guess that the world of 1999.