Unfit is an earnestly written novel from the point of view of a woman in her sixties looking back on her life which started badly but ended up well.  The story is set in North Carolina, starting in the early 1950s, with a family living in poverty.  All the problems start when her father dies in a car accident.  Chrissy Rollings is a young girl and her mother has mental troubles; she is unstable and she has a hard time looking after her family.  Chrissy is the oldest child and has a lot of responsibility.  But when she is 13 she goes off with her best friend and runs away from home; they end up in trading sex for money.  They get caught and reported to the authorities, and the state pressure Chrissy’s mother to sign off on sterilizing her daughter.  Even though Chrissy protests, they do it.  She becomes full of anger for her mother, and her mother’s mental state deteriorates.  It gets so bad that she is split up from her brothers and sisters and she lives in a foster home.  Her life just gets worse and worse, so she gets involved in an abusive relationship and she can’t sort her life out.  But her good nature wins her friends and she manages to turn her life around, eventually getting everything she wants.  We get some information about the sterilization policy in North Carolina, how it was carried out, and how people were affected.  So the book is educational and some readers will like the happy progress of her life to conventional marriage with adopted children.  However, the plot is monothematic, predictable and tiresome, reminiscent of many sad tales of abuse.  The main virtues of the book are in its highlighting of ethical abuses in the USA related to the old eugenics program of the first half of the century which somehow survived past the Second World War.

© 2014 Christian Perring

Christian Perring, Professor of Philosophy, Dowling College, New York