Black Cake

In many ways, Black Cake is centrally about the power, the reach, and the presence of the sea. Covey is an island girl, a long-distance open-water swimmer. She grows up in the Caribbean and then later lives in England, itself an island, and puts down roots in Anaheim, about a half hour from the Pacific; Benny lives in Manhattan, surrounded by stretches of open water; the Southern California culture of the Bennett home is defined by surfing; and Byron and Etta Pringle make their name as environmental crusaders for the preservation of the ocean. The novel begins and ends in scenes set on the open sea.

For opposite reasons, what the sea represents attracts both Covey and her son, Byron. The sea represents the incalculable power of change and the sweeping majesty (and terrifying power) of volatility. When Covey engages the bay as she trains for the harbor competition, she senses the energy of the currents, the way the ocean commands and demands its own integrity. As a swimmer, she negotiates, pays close attention to signals of change, and is forever searching for the narrow stretches where she can make her way. The ocean reveals her vulnerability. It commands respect because of its resistance to pattern, how crazily it makes anticipation ironic. The sea thus becomes for Covey a strategy for her own life, a metaphor for how she learns to respect the agency of chance and the irony of planning and how she is, nevertheless, determined to ride the surf, to make her way. Nothing stops her. From her wedding reception to her years in London to the train wreck to her marriage and her life as Eleanor Bennett, Covey adapts, adopts, and improves. As she shows in her long-distance training regimen, yes, she is willing to adjust, willing to change as the currents change, respecting the sheer power of the free ocean while at the same time understanding the depth of her own resiliency. Adaptation is the only way to navigate successfully through the daunting openness of the sea itself.

It is central to the education of her son, Byron, that he begins the novel as a scientist, driven by the scientist’s certainty that the natural world is there to be understood, to yield its apparent mysteries to patient observation and careful computation. Byron, from his adolescence, is the child his kid sister is not: He plans; he calculates; he sets and meets goals. He knows who he is, who is family is, and his position as a brilliant Black scientist in a field dominated by whites. Lynette, his exasperated ex-girlfriend, tells him he is joyless, too obsessed with the plans he sets, uneasy with change. It is one of the turning points in Byron’s education when he finds out that Lynette is pregnant with his child. Along with the stunning revelations of his mother’s recording, Byron undergoes a most profound change of perception. From the scientist who believed in his own ambitious project to use robots to map the entirety of the ocean floor—everything that “we can learn about who we are as human beings and what we are willing to do will be tested by this technology,” he proudly crows to his webcast’s audience (99)—Byron, out on a surfboard, evolves in the closing pages. Now he is impressed by what the ocean will not reveal and is giddy with the idea of engaging with the world. The best model is not the scientist with an army of robots but a surfer with a longboard. 

In a deliberately planned/unplanned peripatetic life that has crisscrossed multiple continents, included a variety of possible careers, and tested a number of often volatile and doomed relationships, Benny has held on to a single object from her formative years: her mother’s measuring cup, a “cloudy looking piece of plastic that is older than she is” (65). Her mother gave her the measuring cup when Benny first left for college: “This way you’ll always have a little piece of home with you” (65).

The cup, “ounces on one side, milliliters on the other” (66), symbolizes how Covey’s life balances the business of planning and adjusting when such plans inevitably collapse of their irony. The cup thus symbolizes Benny’s life as well, how she makes plans and then adjusts when those plans go awry. In turn, the cup represents the problem with Byron’s careful, measured approach to life. Byron is a planner. For Byron the cup is useless (he suggests Benny pitch it and replace it with a new one) because the numbers have rubbed off and the thing is beaten and cracked after years of kitchen use. If you can’t measure with it, what good is it?

For both Covey and her free-spirited daughter Benny, the battered measuring cup represents the necessary balance between expectation and surprise, between planning and adlibbing, that defines the central tension in their lives. As Covey explains to her young daughter, a real baker, a baker at heart, does not need the cup not for measuring—written recipes only pretend to impose order on what should be coming from the heart. The cup helps, obviously, carrying the ingredients and giving a general idea of proportion. A baker needs the measuring cup but never depends on it. Much like the Byron’s army of robots he intends to send out to map the mystery out of the ocean floor, the measuring cup, new and pristine, would bend the free spirit of the baker to the careful demands of a recipe. Thus, the ancient measuring cup symbolizes Covey’s family, part design, part spontaneity, part planning, part adjusting. In this way, the measuring cup that Benny hangs on to like a talisman symbolizes the serious business of how to live in a world that refuses to yield to expectation and logic. 

Given its obvious investment in the power of storytelling, Black Cake, with its scale and scope, could easily use the structural format of a traditional conventional novel—that is, the linear retelling of the picaresque life journey of Covey Lyncook, from her earliest memories to the impromptu service scattering her ashes in the Pacific Ocean by her reunited family, a straight shot from the early 1960s to spring 2018. Rather, what debut novelist Charmaine Wilkerson constructs is an anything-but-conventional narrative related in an anything-but-chronological sequencing. For instance, in one chapter, we follow Eleanor Bennett surfing the Internet and happening to catch a short video clip about an exotic Caribbean vegetable being narrated by a middle-aged woman who, Eleanor notes, looks like her. One page earlier, we were given the riveting account of Eleanor (no longer Covey) being raped at work in Scotland. Forty pages after that, we follow Eleanor sadly signing over Mathilda, the child born of that violation, to family services. Fifty pages later, we are given the awkward reunion at the convention where the woman from the YouTube video is giving a talk. Her name is Marble Martin, who is, we find out 20 pages later, actually Mathilda.

The structural format is central to the experience of the novel. The novel is divided into more than 150 short chapters, each with a different point-of-view focus, each with its own descriptive title (like a short story), and none dependent on the chapters before or after for continuity. The novel draws on a widely popular fiction form called flash fiction, developed to use the quick-cut technologies of the Internet and the model of social media communications that cater to the growing reality of shorter attention spans, although exponents of flash fiction date the form’s earliest expressions to the less-is-more fictions of Anton Chekov and Ernest Hemingway.

Here, with the accumulating weight of these fragmentary chapters, the novel places extraordinary demands on the reader to maintain some kind of narrative order. Chronological time is freely violated. Sometimes the chapter’s headings indicate which character will dominate this chapter, but not always. The flash fiction format shatters narrative order and compels the reader to work these fragmentary chapters into plot (it is tempting to invoke Byron’s bumper sticker wisdom from his canned school presentations: RIDE THE WAVE). One chapter might foreshadow events that will be related much later, while others reveal the import of events that were covered earlier.

This quick-cut formal device limits reader sympathy because no single point of view dominates. The chapters reflecting Eleanor Bennett’s recording are set in italics, but otherwise each chapter looks exactly alike. In a novel that argues the definition of three generations of Covey’s family relies on the hammer-stroke intrusion of chance and strategies for handling surprises and the unexpected, what better way to mimic that sort of life-on-the-edge-of-clarity idea than with a nonlinear novel in which six different characters contribute to the novel’s point of view.