Based on its premise, Happy Snak had me at hello: it is about an enterprising business woman who opens a snackbar on a space station shared between humans and hermaphroditic aliens known as the Kishocha. In many ways, however, the novel's joyous potential isn't really fulfilled. A lot is implied and very little shown, and the lingering impression is of a short story that's been unnecessarily grown into a novel.
The protagonist, Gaia Jones—whose name is repeated often enough that I felt slightly patronised—attempts to help a Kishocha called Kenjan who is dying, and ends up being made keeper/guardian of its ghost. For Gaia, this is an opportunity to relocate her failing snack bar in the only mixed human-Kishocha area of the A-Ki space station. But before too long, she is torn between demands from the managers of the human part of the space station (it is made clear that humans are definitely second class citizens on the space station) and the demands of her ghostly new charge, when she really just wants to focus on selling snacks and increasing her sales.
Kimberling makes a good attempt at creating non-gendered aliens, but the Kishocha aren't entirely convincing. While the blurb claims that the aliens are hermaphroditic they rarely stray from activities or behaviours that are generally coded masculine. Child-raising is mentioned briefly, but none of the characters we meet appear to have children. The Kishocha are identified entirely by their jobs. The one clear moment when a Kishocha does engage in feminine coded activities—when Wave, Gaia's assistant, tries on make-up with her—it seems more like play than performative gender enactment.
It didn't take Gaia long. She used the white to carve out lines in the black spot over Wave's eye and the black to create the mirror image on the white side of Wave's face. She then added swooping eyebrow shapes and drew long thin arcing lines down to Wave's jaw line. She ended up with a butterfly-shaped pattern that looked Halloweeny, but was symmetrical . . . . They admired one another and their own handiwork for a while, exchanging compliments. Then Wave sighed. "This is very bad, indeed, but it is a secret badness. I yearn to be irritating to others." (pp.139-140)
In contrast, masculine coded activities and behaviours, like physical labour, fighting, gambling, and stoicism are presented as entirely natural to the Kishocha. Kimberling is clearly aware of this problem, as she has Gaia remark that she had forgotten that the Kishocha are hermaphroditic, instead thinking of them all as male, but she doesn't seem to be able to do anything about it. This could be Kimberling's answer to Le Guin's The Left Hand of Darkness, which was famously criticised, eventually even by Le Guin herself, for excluding women by using the male pronoun "he" for all Gethenians. If this is the case, however, while Kimberling draws attention to the problem, she doesn't resolve it. The Kishocha are neither gender balanced, equally masculine and feminine enough to invoke human intersexuality, nor alien enough in their behaviours that it doesn't matter.
Kimberling's use of language is evocative, but uneven. The Kishocha and Happy Snak are described well and repeatedly, while Gaia and the rest of the space station are barely described at all. The physical descriptions of the Kishocha, while repeated several times, are well-realised, and do give a sense of their alienness. (They are large, strangely coloured, have tentacles and have their reproductive organs in their necks—giving rise to one of the most graphic metaphors for masturbation I've encountered in quite a while.) The snackbar itself has words lavished over it. The yellow plastic chairs, the Formica tops, the shiny chrome of the deep fat fryers, the stacks of napkins and plastic straws.
Bright, cheerful "sun-lite brand" lighting fixtures suffused the dining room of Happy Snak with a warm morning glow. Beneath their feet, while and yellow floor tiles gleamed in unscuffed glory. Everything was new. The butter-yellow paint still emanated a slight wet smell. Above the counter, three new menu-board screens displayed her carefully planned list of available snacks. . . . Now full-color moving pictures and dazzling graphics blazed over her front-counter area like a perpetual fireworks display. Near the front doors, Gaia's narrow bank of video games flashed exciting silent images. (p. 91)
This is a world made entirely of surfaces, like an optimistic and upbeat version of a Don DeLillo novel. In contrast, the space station on which the narrative takes place is barely sketched. Kimberling's worldbuilding isn't entirely convincing, although the living walls from which the Kishocha parts of the space station are made are suitably evocative of their alienness. Moreover, the world beyond the space station, in fact even beyond Happy Snak, barely exists in this book. We are clearly meant to identify that there is a larger story being played out, but we are told next to nothing about the politics of Earth that have led to this joint human-Kishocha space station.
The Kishocha and humans have only recently come into contact and are still trying to decide what to do about each other. Given the anxiety of her managers, Gaia's story must be important to how this is going to play out, but we never know enough to have a sense of what the events we see will mean for those we don't. The only point in the narrative where we are given any real information about the Kishocha is an infodump in chapter four that is so tedious that even the characters are clearly bored. Having the characters sit down and watch a video explaining about Kishocha hierarchies might work on screen, but it really doesn't work in print.
It's clear that we are meant to be limited by Gaia's knowledge of the Kishocha—she doesn't know very much and so nor do we. And the domesticity of Happy Snak is very much a strength, constantly reminding us of the ways in which large, complex events play out in and across the lives of ordinary people. And I rather liked Gaia: she is plucky and determined and quite proud, particularly of Happy Snak. Everything that occurs in the novel is framed in those terms and, in this sense, I was somewhat reminded of Alexander McCall Smith's Botswana books (No. 1 Ladies Detective Agency, etc.). Gaia Jones, like Precious Ramotswe, is entirely focused on making her business a success.
Her fixation with selling snacks is, of course, entirely reasonable. Happy Snak is a new business and in the current economic climate it is hardly surprising that Kimberling wants to show us how difficult it is to keep afloat. It is even possible that Gaia's position—dedicated small business owner buffeted by forces beyond her control—is meant to work as a criticism of credit crunch capitalism. Such a reading, however, is undermined by the force of the narrative. Gaia's business is shown repeatedly to be a means of releasing the Kishocha from their rigidly hierarchical society in which those of low birth live as slaves while those of high birth rule in luxury.
Wave moves from serving Kenjan, the Kishocha whose ghost Gaia is now responsible for, to working in Happy Snak. Gaia pays Wave for the time it (I almost wrote "he") spends working in Happy Snak and it immediately exchanges its money for orange dye, itself bought from Happy Snak.
"Will I get some tomorrow?" Wave clutched its empty orange cup.
"Maybe after the store's closed."
"Then I will cheerfully begin my duties, knowing that orange awaits me."
Gaia waited until she heard Wave flop across the dining room before she removed the hand-held.
"Order a couple more gallons of Orange number 17," she whispered, then pushed the send icon. (p.91)
Wave is Walmart's dream employee. Orange dye has an effect similar to alcohol on the Kishocha and once Gaia discovers Wave's desire for it she quickly engineers strategies to introduce it to other Kishocha. Her plans are only briefly held up by the discovery that the Kishocha don't use money, until our canny heroine identifies items they do exchange that can be sold to the human population back on earth, thereby setting up a chain of supply and demand with Happy Snak at the centre. The ability of free-market capitalism to release the Kishocha from servitude is never questioned. Despite the occasional wry nod to the reader—the initial location of Happy Snak is the food court in Coca Cola Tower—the novel appears to fully endorse the idea that capitalism can set us free.
But in some ways Gaia is too ordinary. Her lack of curiosity about anything other than ways to sell snacks to the Kishocha make her a frustrating character; at times, she is almost reduced to a sketch of a snack saleswoman. I refuse to believe that anyone with the drive to go into space to start their business would have little to no interest in the larger forces at work that allow her to do so. Not knowing is not the same as not caring, and Gaia Jones doesn't seem to care about the complexities of the people human or Kishocha she meets beyond knowing what to sell to them. Here again I was reminded of McCall Smith's novels, but less positively: both heroines offer the opportunity to build on the second wave feminist adage that the personal is political, but neither Kimberling nor McCall takes advantage, and both end up with rather depoliticised and conservative politics underpinning narratives that work to reinforce, rather than challenge, the status quo. If Happy Snak were a first novel, I'd be anticipating the author doing something really quite interesting later on, but for a fourth novel from a writer whose debut (Turnskin, 2007) won a Lambda award, I expected better.
Jude Roberts comes from United Kingdom, Earth and is obsessed with all things craft related. She is also writing a PhD thesis on Iain M. Banks's Culture.