Summary
Oona’s mother is one of the last people in town to change color. When it happens, Oona worries her mother may harm herself. She observes her mother engaging online with the same people she used to; most of them have changed by now and have posted photos of their new selves. Oona’s mother only looks, not yet taking part.
Anders’s father dies on a crisp, clear morning. Anders sits next to his father as he watches him struggle to take his last breath. Anders calls Oona crying. She is with him when the undertakers come to take Anders’s father’s body away, his burial already arranged and paid for by Anders’s father. After leaving his father’s body to be prepared by the undertakers, Anders is hit with the strange certainty that he should be the one to dig his father’s grave; he faintly regrets that he talks himself out of it.
At the funeral, Anders is surprised that he does not hate the service; it is comforting to be with other people who have come to pay their respects. Anders’s father is the last pale person left in the town. With his burial, the last white man is “committed to the soil.”
Oona’s mother continues visiting the “online venues” she used to frequent. While some have gone quiet, others have ramped up their rhetoric. She reads of talk of coming cannibalism. People who have changed talk of still knowing the difference between the changed dark people and the “savagery” of the original dark people. Oona’s mother reads with fear, but her alarm steadily makes her enjoy engaging online less. She spends fewer days online and gradually Oona notices her mother beginning to speak. On weekends, Oona accompanies Anders to the graveyard, where they enjoy spending time, hanging around.
One day, Oona confesses she has never visited the graveyard where her father and brother are buried, believing she would never go there until she was dead herself. Anders asks if she would like to visit; she says she would, one day. They go for a drink at a bar, the first time they have done so in months. They look at all the other dark faces in the place as the whiskey settles in their stomachs. They go to a vegetarian restaurant. The server greets Oona as though she knows her. It takes Oona a moment to realize the woman probably treats everyone this way, as though they are regulars she is meeting again.
When there is no great reckoning in which the formerly white are hunted down, Oona’s mother relaxes. She finds she doesn’t mind being out among people. She misses being white and wonders if her grandchildren might be white, but she knows this likely won’t be the case. To make things right, she asks Oona if they can go visit Anders. She surprises Anders and Oona by taking Anders’s hand and confiding the difficulty of mourning a parent when you are an only child, as she too had had to do. The first picture Oona’s mother posts to her social media account is one of Oona and Anders posing together.
Oona goes to renew her driver’s license. The clerk turns out to be a former partner of her brother’s. They get together for coffee and have a delightful time catching up. The man talks of how he got married a week before Oona’s brother’s funeral. He believes that marriage is a bigger change than having changed color. They compliment each other on how their new colors suit them. With spring in full swing, Oona spends increasingly more time staying at Anders’s family home, helping him set up the place. She buys Anders a bike for his birthday and they cycle to work together in the mornings. At the gym, Anders finally speaks with the scrawny cleaner. He offers to train him so he can start using the equipment, like other employees. The man says he wouldn’t like that; he would like a raise.
The town and the country itself seem as if they are in mourning; there is also a sense of something new being born. Crews work on fixing the infrastructure that took a beating over the winter. Anders and Oona clear out Anders’s childhood home and together spackle and sand and hammer, getting rid of layers of dirt, dust, and smoke, setting up the nest for their future. They make a meditation and exercise room. They leave Anders’s childhood bedroom freshly painted and empty.
Years go by swiftly for the couple. They have a daughter, who grows quickly into a woman. Oona and Anders speak little of the past, but Oona’s mother does. Eventually the daughter tells her grandmother to stop talking about the family’s white past, holding her hands tenderly. After a flash of anger, Oona’s mother smiles.
The narrator comments that Oona and Anders don’t have a second child. They have sex less regularly, switching from their habit of doing it at night to occasional mornings. One morning, they are just about to engage in sex when their teenage daughter opens the door and lies in bed next to them. She is fully dressed and smells of her night out; she hasn’t slept. They comfort their daughter. The novel ends with Anders suddenly imaging his daughter as an old woman, what she will look like after they are gone. He puts his brown hand on his brown daughter’s face and she lets him soothe her.
Analysis
Hamid further highlights the absurdity of race as a social construct when Oona’s mother, the implicit white supremacist, herself turns brown. As one of the last holdouts in society, Oona’s mother meets the change with a calm resignation, quietly mourning the loss of her white privilege. She views photos of former racist allies proudly showing their changed selves—a symbol of the new social harmony spreading over the country.
Another sign of burgeoning social harmony is Anders’s father’s death. Never having changed color himself, Anders’s father is the last white man in town. With Anders’s father’s burial, the last vestige of whiteness and racial difference disappears, marking the beginning of a new post-race era in which the social construct of race is but a memory.
However, to emphasize the absurdity of racial prejudice, “changed” people continue to post online about racial difference, wishing to differentiate themselves from those who were always brown-skinned. After a lifetime of absorbing explicit and implicit racist ideas, Oona’s mother is still liable to be alarmed by these notions. However, they have less power over her now, and she steadily weans herself off the mentally damaging internet.
The theme of mortality returns as Anders and Oona make a habit of visiting Anders’s parents’ graves. While Anders has spent much of the novel absorbed in fears of death, he comes to accept the inevitability of death. Rather than avoid death, he reminds himself every weekend that it is a component of life by spending time in a graveyard. Having faced his fear, he lessens the anxiety that results from obsessing about death.
As a counterpoint to the societal collapse that was at the center of the novel, Hamid dedicates the end of the book to the theme of social harmony. In a society where there are no longer any arbitrary racial divisions among people, Anders and Oona and Oona’s mother learn to embrace their lives. For Anders and Oona, their optimism about the future is evident in the way they renovate Anders’s family home, making it their own for the next generation. While Oona’s mother struggles to move past her nostalgia, her granddaughter shows her the importance of embracing the present by getting her to stop talking about what it meant to be white. For Anders’s and Oona’s daughter, the only relevant reality is the one in which they currently live.
