The best books that, low-key, are about revenge

I read The Street a few years after I moved out of Harlem, where this novel is set. I was immediately struck by the continuities between Petry’s depressed 1940s Harlem and the gentrified neighborhood I encountered in the 2010s. Petry looked past myth and legacy and observed people and institutions. I think her story felt so resonant decades later because she could see the circuitry and infrastructure of New York City, and that insight informs her storytelling at every level. The Street’s gut-wrenching climax lands because, leading up to it, Petry so skillfully catalogs the injustices that can flow through one life, one place. It’s not a classical revenge story, but it totally is.

Invisible Man, another Harlem novel, is deeply concerned with comeuppance. The titular character is a bit of a cipher at the beginning of the story, but as he is increasingly railroaded, deceived, and exploited he grows certain that he must shake all the forces bearing down on him. That realization that gaining freedom will piss off his many adversaries, and his struggle to secure his autonomy as the novel comes to a head, always strikes me as vengeful. 

I first read Sula for a college English class and remember the discussions of the book, often centering on the likeability of the title character. This annoyed me greatly because so much of the novel is about how being liked has so little to do with who you are or how you treat others. Sula figures this out very early in life, and she uses that awareness to wreak havoc on her gossipy and superstitious town. Lots of revenge tales traffic in spectacular reversals and gratuitous body counts, but Sula’s vengeance takes the form of sustained indifference to other people’s gazes and anxieties. It ends in tragedy technically, but in my reading, Sula gets the last laugh. 

Tess of the d’Urbervilles immerses you in the tragic life of a milkmaid who is trampled on by the world yet always committed to finding happiness. There are passages in this tragic book that bask in the simple joys of walking and laboring, and that pastoral bliss perfectly ballasts the book’s queasy accounts of the routine violence inflicted on its heroine. The plot eventually features an explicit act of revenge, but I think the constant attempts to evade her fate and escape her circumstances are the more interesting moments of retribution.

I recommend the entire Broken Earth trilogy, but the final book does the most interesting things with the series’ latticework of narrative symmetry. By this point, it’s clear that a mother and her daughter are the centerpieces of the story, and that they are both on track to collide. As they draw nearer and their journeys beget staggering losses and sacrifices, they switch polarities and the daughter, once meek, challenges her warrior mother, who has pacified after a life of war and loss. And amid all this is a story about why the Earth, which is a living being, rages against humanity. The layers amplify the thrills of the payoffs and reversals, and subtly unpack the cyclicity of revenge.