Seeing Red

The Second Coming of Hillary Jordan

by Nina Shengold, September 28, 2011

Don’t expect to get anything else done while reading Hillary Jordan’s blistering new novel When She Woke (Algonquin, 2011). Its opening sentences are so arresting that the publisher printed them on the front cover of advance reading copies:

When she woke, she was red. Not flushed, not sunburned, but the solid, declarative red of a stop sign.

Jordan breezes into an Italian café near Grand Central Station, wearing a peach-toned sleeveless blouse, black jeans, and sandals, a large bag slung over one shoulder. She could as easily be a late-summer tourist as an award-winning novelist on the brink of a major book launch—at least until she pulls out a scarlet iPad to display her tour schedule. Between now and mid-December, she’ll appear at three major trade shows and 34 author events nationwide; When She Woke is Indie Next’s #1 pick for October.

The whirlwind is just getting started, but Jordan has been there before. Her debut novel Mudbound (Algonquin, 2008) won the Bellwether Prize—a biannual award for socially responsible fiction founded by Barbara Kingsolver—and numerous other honors. A saga of complex family ties and brutal racism, it unfolds in rural Mississippi post-WWII, as two traumatized soldiers return to a hardscrabble cotton farm. Jamie is the glamorous, broken brother of new owner Henry, Ronsel the proud son of black sharecroppers; their fates intersect with tragic force. Mudbound received glowing reviews and sold more than 250,000 copies worldwide.

Such a breakout success is a hard act to follow. “Writing when you don’t know if anybody but your parents will ever read it is very different from writing under contract,” Jordan asserts, after asking a waiter for “iced tea—no sugar, no lemon, nothing.” As Mudbound’s sales climbed, Algonquin offered her a two-book contract, accepting the opening chapters of When She Woke as the first. This was an act of no small faith, since the two novels are wildly different.

Where Mudbound is a period piece, When She Woke takes place in a dystopian future a generation or so away, and too close for comfort. The US government has become a fundamentalist theocracy that resembles a Rick Perry rally on steroids (now known as “nanoenhancers”). It’s as if Jordan has watered the Monsanto seeds of today’s Christian right and let it grow like Jack’s beanstalk. Her Texan landscape is just outside the familiar—strip-mall chains mix new and old corporate logos; local readers may note there’s a coffeehouse called Muddy Cup.

In this new society, prison overcrowding has been solved by “melachroming” criminals: chemically tinting their skins and releasing them onto the streets, where they’ve become a despised new underclass—literal people of color. When Hannah Payne wakes up as a Red, everybody who sees her knows she’s been found guilty of murder: Her full-body Scarlet A stands for Abortion as well as Adultery.