Danzy Senna, Symptomatic

Symptomatic is the story of a young, biracial woman who moves to New York City in the 1990s to work for a magazine. She forms attachments to the wrong sorts of people and pays the price for it, all while feeling uncomfortable about her identity and wondering which world—black or white or neither—she fits into. This lack of a clear racial identity is a huge issue for her and for the people she meets—rather tediously so, actually. Reading the book, one gets the sense at first that there's some mystery about her identity—why she is nondescript, why secretive, why she doesn't seem to form lasting connections. But it turns out (unfortunately) not to be that kind of a book. She's not hiding anything, at least no more than most of us are. The book ends rather differently. After a bunch of well-written prose that doesn't, however, really go anywhere, the conclusion comes fast and action-packed and rather hard to believe. While I enjoyed reading the book—because the writing is good, as I said, because it promised a payoff—I'm left feeling disappointed that there wasn't more to it.