She becomes a wild creature, frightened of nearly everything, including herself, and that doesn’t go away once she’s free. The book’s title refers to Haiti, and also to the condition to which Mireille’s trauma reduces her. The Haiti in which Mireille is kidnapped is pre-earthquake but ravaged by overwhelming poverty - a dangerous place in part because so few have so much, and so many have almost nothing. Woven through it is the love story of Mireille, the American daughter of Haitian parents who moved back to Port-au-Prince when their children were grown, and her husband, Michael, a blond Nebraskan raised on a farm.
The novel is split into two parts, the kidnapping and its aftermath. This is the Haitian hellscape of Roxane Gay’s debut novel, “An Untamed State,” a simmering, sometimes brutal examination of love, privilege, the meaning of home, and the horrific damage that can come to women at the hands of men.
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