By the Light of My Father’s Smile was published by Random House in 1998. The narrator is a dead man — Mr. Robinson, an African American anthropologist who took his family to live among the Mundo people of Mexico while secretly serving as a missionary. When he discovers his daughter Magdalena having sex with a young Mundo man, he beats her savagely — an act that destroys Magdalena’s capacity for sexual joy and warps the entire family for generations.
The novel is narrated from the afterlife, where Mr. Robinson can see the consequences of his violence rippling through his daughters’ lives: Magdalena becomes obese and sexually withdrawn; her sister Susannah becomes a novelist whose fiction tries to repair what their father broke. Walker interweaves the Robinson family story with the Mundo people’s relationship to sexuality and the body — a relationship characterized by reverence, openness, and the integration of erotic and spiritual life that Western Christianity has sundered.
The novel’s explicit sexual content and its argument that patriarchal religion’s repression of sexuality is a form of violence against women generated significant controversy. Critics were divided between those who found the novel’s eroticism liberating and those who found its spiritual framework naïve. Walker’s prose here is at its most lyrical and least restrained — the language reaches toward ecstasy, and some readers found it reaching too far.
Collecting By the Light of My Father’s Smile
First edition (Random House, New York, 1998): Hardcover with dust jacket.
Market values:
- First edition, fine/fine: $15–$35
- Very good: $8–$20