PASSING STRANGE

Prejudice against unattractive women is equated with racism, in a self-important first novel about a young woman whose cosmetic surgery dramatically alters her life.

Claudia is a working-class girl from Vermont with a big nose and a weak chin. MacLeod leaves it ambiguous whether her protagonist is grotesquely ugly or merely plain, but Claudia definitely thinks she’s the former. Her self-absorption, although acknowledged, tries the reader’s patience and limits her credibility. While she identifies with Anne Frank as a fellow sufferer who was “not pretty,” Claudia (or MacLeod: the author/narrator boundary is hard to decipher in the sometimes graceful, often overblown prose) zeroes in on others characters’ physical imperfections. In adolescence she becomes obsessed with Dan, a good-looking preppie bad boy. Five years later they meet again, fall in love, and marry despite (or perhaps because of) the disparity between them. He has all the money and looks, she the brains and imagination. Soon he wants children, but she puts him off for reasons never quite clear. Then Dan gets a job transfer to North Carolina. Claudia arrives there as a newly minted pretty woman, thanks to the nose job and chin implant he has suggested, influenced by his snobbish mother. Claudia obsesses about the implications of the change while enjoying the benefits. She and Dan make friends with a stereotypical rich good ol’ boy and his wife, racists like every other white southerner they meet. Dan adapts to the South by becoming even more boorish; Claudia begins a torrid affair with her black yardman Calvin. When Dan is murdered, innocent Calvin is charged. Sensitive Claudia is naturally devastated and chastened by her responsibility in these events. Nevertheless, she’ll find a new rich white husband with whom she can continue to “pass” as pretty.

Difficult to take seriously, despite MacLeod’s obviously serious intentions.