sowing seeds in unexpected ways
- A Review by Kevin Zambrano
- Jul 1, 2015
- 3 min read
Mr. and Ms. Doctor
by Julie Iromuanya
Julie Iromuanya’s new book opens with a scene that's both violent and comic, one of the best in the book. On his honeymoon, Job Ogbonnaya gets rough with Ifi, his new wife. He shoves her up against the wall and tears at her underwear. (Job only knows about sex from watching porn.) Ifi, for her part, punches her new husband first in the stomach, next in the ear. Being a 40ish-year-old virgin is an embarrassing problem, and Job's bad decision that arises from his inexperience leads only to further embarrassment.
Shame leads to a regrettable choice that leads to further shame—this structure governs Mr. and Mrs. Doctor, an interesting novel that is by turns blunt and subtle, realistic yet credulity-stretching, mercilessly bleak but not without a few good laughs.
Ifi and Job's marriage is an arranged one; she’s young, in her twenties, and the aunt and uncle who raised her found a hotshot doctor for her to marry. But the eponymous Mr. Doctor is no doctor at all; Job’s a lowly hospital assistant who has convinced all of his Nigerian friends and family that he’s a hotshot doctor in America. They reconcile when Ifi finds him trying on her clothes, one of the few moments of levity in the book. A couple months later, she arrives in Nebraska, pregnant, to live with him. Job leaves every morning wearing a white coat with a stethoscope in the pocket, but his shambolic apartment telegraphs to Ifi that Job’s no doctor. Instead of calling him out on his lies, she becomes his enabler; she wants to remain “Mrs. Doctor,” after all. As a result of their dreams—or delusions—for Ifi and Job, America is often little more than an accumulation of indignities, and long stretches of the novel pile humiliation atop humiliation.
Job lies to everyone, himself most of all, and in America, Ifi learns to do the same. America seems to have that effect on Iromuanya’s characters; their intense focus on status leads to their downfall. Emeka and Gladys, Job and Ifi’s fellow Igbo friends, are more successful than “Mr. and Mrs. Doctor,” but not nearly as successful as they present themselves, nor any less deluded by the American dream. But it’s not only immigrants who are caught in the cycle of deception and self-deception, as evidenced by Cheryl, a white woman who was technically Job’s first wife, his partner in a sham marriage for citizenship. Her return after years without talking to Job, begging hands outstretched, helps drive the narrative forward.
Cheryl, Ifi, and Gladys are much more complicated than Job. The best parts of the novel focus on the three women, who all seem more complex in their flawed reasoning and contradictory impulses—more human. Job, on the other hand, is much like his Biblical namesake, undergoing a series of awful punishments without understanding why. The difference is that though the cause of Old Testament Job’s suffering was unknowable, and to the reader of Mr. and Mrs. Doctor, it’s clear that Job Ogbonnaya brings his troubles upon himself. No action in this novel is without consequence, and Job’s comeuppances allow Iromuanya to showcase her gifts as a dramatic storyteller, discreetly planting seeds everywhere, sowing them in unexpected ways.
The novel comes most alive in its third act, where a heartbreaking misfortune befalls Job and Ifi. The sustained focus on Ifi and Job’s reaction really allows Iromuanya to really crack her characters open, exposing their insides. In this last section Ifi also features prominently, which goes a long way toward making the story even more compelling. The novel’s enjoyable and insightful—particularly when the spotlight illuminates the absurd nuances of racism—but you may find yourself wishing there had been less of Mr. Doctor and more of Mrs. Doctor.
Kevin Zambrano is from Long Beach, California. He is a graduate of UC Santa Barbara's College of Creative Studies, and he has an MFA from Sarah Lawrence College, where he was the Fiction Editor of Lumina. His poetry, essays, and journalism has appeared in Arcadia, Gargoyle, Sentence, Into the Teeth of the Wind, and The Santa Barbara Independent. He blogs at The Vivisector, and you can follow him on Twitter at @kevinzamb
For more work by Kevin Zambrano, check out his page at our Online Sundries site.
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