Shifting Through Neutral [Paperback]

Bridgett M. Davis (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: May 3, 2005

Not yet a woman yet more than a little girl, Rae Dodson is caught up in her family's drama. Her hip older sister, Kimmie, whom her mother favors, has moved from New Orleans to join them in Detroit, a city that moves as if in synch with the Stevie Wonder tunes that play giddily from new automobiles fresh off the factory lots. Her bid whist–playing mother is as nervous as ever, and her father's chronic migraines seem less responsive to medication. And while they all occupy the same house, they might as well be living separate lives. When the tenuous peace finally breaks, Rae must decide where her loyalties lie: should she choose her emotionally distant mother, whom she adores, or her affectionate but needy father? Rae does choose and launches into a rich, loving relationship with her dad, for whom she shows a fierce, undying loyalty. But as she matures, she must find a way amid her own budding sexuality to be both Daddy's girl and her own woman.

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

In her strong debut, indie film director Davis (1996's Naked Acts) deconstructs the daddy's girl myth by viewing it from a fresh African-American perspective. Set in Detroit between 1967 and 1980, this lively coming-of-age tale rocks with the sounds of Stevie Wonder, whose own mother serves as one of the card-playing supporting characters. Rae Dodson has no regrets about sleeping on the back of her slowly dying father, JD, a General Motors assembly-line worker suffering from hypertension and granted disability at age 36, until she's forced, at age nine, to sleep in her own bedroom ("I formed myself out of the five o'clock shadow of his maleness"). The reader braces for the worst, but Davis opts for the high road as she explores the father and daughter's almost symbiotic relationship, contrasting it with the distant one Rae has with her troubled mother, Vy. Meanwhile, Vy waits for Cyril, her lover and the father of Rae's older sister Kimmie, to rescue her from a marriage marred by JD's infidelity. Heartbreak and sudden tragedy compel the appealing Rae to grow up on the fast track. Davis doesn't miss a beat in this moving study of dysfunctional families and the power of transcendent love. Apt driving manual excerpts head each section, while a wonderfully done twist ending strikes a final ironic note. Two thumbs up, and skip the speed bumps at your own risk.
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved. --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

From Booklist

In Detroit in the late '60s and '70s, Rae Dodson is growing up alongside her city: "We were watching it go from a resentful and surly child of white forces to a wild and excited youth of black power." In her comfortable, middle-class, black neighborhood, where Stevie Wonder's mother is a friend, Rae lives in a divided house. Her independently wealthy mother lives upstairs; her father, disabled by crippling hypertension and migraines, lives in the downstairs den, where Rae, intensely devoted to her father, also sleeps. When Rae is nine years old, her sister Kimmie arrives for the summer and sets in motion a shift in the house that forces Rae to choose between parents. Davis' impressive debut reads like memoir. Narrated in the first-person voice of an adult looking back, the nonlinear scenes shift between Rae's childhood and adolescence, leaving the collective impression of memories--disjointed and sometimes baffling in their significance but also vivid and heartbreaking. A riveting family drama filled with sharply drawn individuals who love and fail each other with stunning intensity. Gillian Engberg
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

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Product Details

• Paperback: 320 pages
• Publisher: Amistad (May 3, 2005)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0060572507
• ISBN-13: 978-0060572501
• Product Dimensions: 8.1 x 5.4 x 0.8 inches
• Shipping Weight: 8 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 4.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (18 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #1,985,790 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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6 of 6 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Papa says I was made from love. But love is complicated, July 4, 2004

By 

M. J Leonard "MikeonAlpha" (Silver Lake, Los Angeles, CA United States) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Shifting Through Neutral (Hardcover)

Family ties, adolescent angst, father-daughter relationships, and the choices that we make in life are at the heart of this gorgeously written and quite captivating novel from Bridgett M. Davis. Like the shifting gears of a car, Davis weaves together a wonderfully symbolic tale of a young girl's drive through the road of life. Set in Detroit between 1967 and 1980, in the African American community, the narrative cleverly shifts backwards and forwards in time, centering on the perceptive Rae Dodson and her efforts to cope with her kind-hearted but bitterly dysfunctional family. While administering to her father, JD who lays dying in a hospital bed, Rae remembers the highs and lows, the trials and tribulations of her childhood and adolescence as she matures along side the city of Detroit, watching it go from "resentful and surly child of white forces to wild and excited youth of back power."

With a fierce and undying loyalty, Rae vows to look after JD, a General Motors assembly-line worker, who is plagued by throbbing headaches and hypertension. JD spends his life laying around and mitigating the pain with loose aspirin, and later, sleep-inducing injections of Demerol. "That's how her father remained alive to her all these years - simple actions, slow movements, and perpetual rest." Rae's disturbed mother Vy has been reduced to taking Valium at the edge of a king-sized bed in order to ease her bad nerves. She calls her state a "sophisticated illness" and she stays hold up in her bedroom waiting for Cyril, her lover and the father of Rae's older sister Kimmie, to rescue her from the unfaithful JD. Vy sleeps during the day then stays awake all night playing Stevie Wonder albums, and reminiscing about happier times.

Vy and JD had a marriage begun with pregnancy that produced a stillborn child. Their union was formed with an expectation and promise that never delivered. Yet Vy has the power, and rules the household because "she controls the cash flow." When Kimmie, exiled to the South by Vy at a young age, returns to Detroit as a sluttish, free-spirited teenager, Rae is overwhelmed with joy. Kimmie's return is like a breath of fresh air, a "rush of light wind in the motionless air of family life," but her presence ultimately disturbs the precarious balance between her mother, her father and herself."

Caught between her love for Vy and her undivided loyalty to JD, Rae decides to stay with her father in Detroit, rather than return to the south with Vy, Kimmie and Cyril. But a terrible car accident, and the arrival of JD's irascible, god-fearing sister, Aunt Essie - one of the most lovable characters - force Rae to grow up fast. Rae comes to the realization that the idea of protection, of a reliable shield against fate is nothing but a mean farce. Rae loves her "papa" and resigns to stay with him through thick and thin, because his love for her is unconditional and absolute. As a teenager, she sees other men as either weak or mean, letting their women steal away in broad daylight, trapping themselves into sad marriages or violently beating their girlfriends. Rae soon learns that men take what they can get, but women can control things - there's a "power dance around money."

David has written a lively coming-of-age tale that is infused with the sounds and sights of the seventies - the music, the Afros, and the bell-bottoms. The sounds of Stevie Wonder are constant, and his own mother is one of the supporting characters who come to play cards, drink and socialize with Vy. Davis's writing has a force and precision, which is so careful and pressurized, that sentence-by-sentence, word-by-word, she locates a true, nuanced path through this potentially disastrous story. The characters are funny, plausible, and tragically frail; but it is the shear niceness of them, especially Rae, that keeps the reader involved in the story. Shifting Through Neutral is nicely paced, has a lovely sense of timing, and is probably one of the best accounts of "growing up" I've read in a long time. Mike Leonard July 04.

4 of 4 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Defacing Beauty, December 6, 2004

By 

Jennifer M (DeKalb, IL USA) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Shifting Through Neutral (Hardcover)

The trouble with reviewing a book like Bridgett M. Davis' Shifting Through Neutral (HarperCollins 2004) is that Davis' first novel contains such elegance and subtlety that any attempt to analyze it is like explaining the punch line to a joke. The normal business of the reviewer becomes as meaningless and gauche as watching Anna Pavlova dance with Tigger. In looking for themes, for an angle to glom onto and extract, I feel like I am committing the waste observed by Davis' narrator as the auto manufacturers submit their models to corrosion testing, "defacing a thing of beauty in order to see how much abuse it could take".

This novel doesn't just tell a story. In fact, it's short on plot and very character-driven. It exposes the soul of a middle-class black family in 1970's Detroit through the eyes of young Rae Dodson. Her father is disabled by crippling migraines and her emotionally-distant mother is popping Valium when her older half-sister, Kimmie, returns from New Orleans where she vanished years ago to live with her father, their mother's one true love. Kimmie's return stirs in Rae a desire to understand her splintered family, to understand the mixed blessings of coming into womanhood, and to find what freedom truly means to her. But, when Kimmie's father comes for them, Rae is forced to confront the price of freedom and define the kind of person she wants to become.

Davis' work is all the more impressive given how badly it could have failed. A novel without a strong plot runs the risk of being a phenomenal bore. Yet she combines a beautiful, haunting prose with fully developed characters who are engaging and have depth while making it all seem effortless. The characters are three-dimensional, coming to life off pages of evocative imagery and very little exposition. Davis doesn't describe Rae; she allows the reader to come to know Rae.

Subtlety is by far Davis' strongest gift as a novelist. She uses her central images of cars, driving, and the road for the full range of those metaphors without ever manipulating the reader emotionally or, indeed, ever even allowing us to see the mechanics of what she's doing. The impact of Rae's observations about her family, about her job at the GM Proving Ground, about her awkward and tumultuous early love affairs brush over the reader's senses like gossamer cobwebs on sensitive flesh.

For this reason alone, Davis deserves recognition for writing important literary fiction and important African-American fiction specifically. Rae's voice as the narrator is undeniably the voice of a Midwestern black girl describing the lives of a black family with a realism and poignancy rarely found in popular fiction. She masterfully focuses on race while utterly transcending it - never portraying black families in the way white readers expect or want to hear, yet never allowing her readers to think the Dodson family "just happens to be black". This is both a black novel and an American novel and to place one over the other would be a disgrace to Davis' work.

Living in Motor City and watching those she loves take to the open road gives Rae a passion for cars and the independence they represent for her. Her story is that of the capricious nature of fate that comes with freedom. Sometimes thrilling, often cruel, and always unpredictable, Shifting Through Neutral exposes part of what it really means to be human, to love and be loved by an imperfect family, and to step fully into life.

4 of 4 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Realistic read with little drama, June 23, 2004

By 

Avid-Readers.com (Los Angeles, CA) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Shifting Through Neutral (Hardcover)

Told in first person from the viewpoint of Rae Dodson, a nine year old girl who sleeps on her father's back. For me, this was a satisfying read. I loved all of the characters, even the ones I should have disliked, I loved, because the writer did so well developing even the most minor characters.

After discovering that this book was set in Detroit, I rushed out and bought it the same day it was released. I was excited about the book because it seemed unique. The story of a daddy's girl also appealed to me because I was never that and secretly longed to be. All of the characters in the book were memorable and interesting. I understood the mother with all of her faults, and I appreciated JD the father and his love for his child.

If you're looking for a lot of drama, you won't find it in this book, but there is a hint of mystery involving JD, Rae, and JD's stepdaughter Kimmie that will keep you guessing until the very end.

Also, the book was set in the 70's and the writer did an excellent job of placing the reader in that era. Similar to listening to an old song that triggers memories, this book did the same for me as I was a young child who grew up in Detroit in the 70's.

If you're looking for beautiful prose and a book with a realistic feel that will thrust you into the story, this is the book I would recommend reading.