Parul Sehgal, a reviewer for
the New York Times, has praised My Absolute Darling, by Gabriel Tallent, for its portrayal of the
central character: a fourteen-year-old girl who has a horrifying life and who
doesn’t fully recognize the fact: “With her scabby knees and clear eyes, her
native iconoclasm and funny nickname, she recalls the great child characters of
American literature, all of them wayward and wounded: Scout from ‘To Kill a
Mockingbird,’ Bone from ‘Bastard Out of Carolina,’ Frankie from ‘The Member of
the Wedding,’ Huck Finn. Her name is significant, too; like Pip from ‘Great
Expectations,’ she has chosen it herself, and it harkens back to yet another
character — Turtle, the tomboy detective from Ellen Raskin’s young-adult novel ‘The
Westing Game.’”[1]
Her name is Turtle. She lives with her father, Martin. It's not clear exactly
what Martin does. He may be some kind of repair man or handyman. But he's
effective at repairing problems in their house whether they have to do with
electricity or plumbing or the water supply or maintaining any number of the many
guns and other weapons that he owns. He’s well-read and highly intelligent. He’s
a survivalist. A woman he was married to, Turtle’s mother, has disappeared.
It's assumed she drowned, or at least that's what Martin tells his daughter.
Given what we learn about him, other explanations may explain her absence.
Point of view is everything
in this novel. It's narrated through Turtle’s perspective. She rarely speaks,
though she thinks a great deal, and Tennant provides access to her thoughts. She at first seems almost autistic (this is
the wrong word) but gradually reveals the intelligence beneath her
exterior. Silence is her protection
against the world, including most significantly her brutal father, some sort of
failed philosopher, and also his daughter’s incestuous molester. She's completely under his influence and
control. It was shocking to realize that not only is Martin an eccentric
survivalist who trains his daughter in survival skills and who tells her that
she needs to know how to fend for herself, to protect herself, should it become
necessary, but that he is also a child rapist. He has sex with her repeatedly,
and this is the fundamental and overwhelming fact the novel confronts. For much
of the novel Turtle doesn't think of herself as her father's victim. She
doesn't think of herself as a rape victim. Sometimes she thinks that she loves
her father and that she doesn't want to lose him and even that she wants to
have sex with him. But this is because she is his hostage, and underneath it
all he terrifies her. He's abusive of her in non-sexual ways. At one point he
slams her to the ground and beats her with a metal rod so badly that she has
difficulty walking and is in pain for days.
Turtle gradually recognizes
what her father is, especially when he leaves home for an extended period and
returns with a 10-year-old girl he picked up at a gas station. He says that he
brought the girl home because she needed somebody to take care of her, but by
this point in the novel we have learned enough about him to suspect that he has
other plans. Turtle herself begins to suspect what those plans are and when one
night he carries through with them, we are led to the extended and horrific
final pages of the novel.
Martin is so possessive of
his daughter that we begin to worry that he has the potential to do more
violence to her than he has already carried out. When he learns that Turtle has
become interested in a boy who lives nearby, his possessiveness leaps
pathologically into action. We don't at first realize what a monster Martin is,
because Turtle doesn't think of him as a monster. She thinks of him as her
father, whom she loves, as an obstacle, as someone whom she must deal with when
he is in temper. Only at the end does she come to see him for what he is. She
comes to feel protective of the ten-year-old, she doesn’t want her to be
abused, and these feelings motivate her actions late in the novel.
The climax of this novel is horrific.
I'm not giving anything away to say that. It's horrific because of what it
portrays, and because it's so well handled by the author.
Tennant writes an extremely
powerful and lyrical prose that gives this novel its distinctive character. There
are moments of over-writing. Martin's
father lives in a trailer near their house. Turtle spends a lot of time with
her grandfather and she loves him—he often expresses concern for her. When her
grandfather sees the scars on her back, he realizes what he has suspected might
be going on all along – that his son is abusing his daughter. He confronts
Martin. They have an argument, and the grandfather has a stroke and dies. This
is an overwritten scene—I’m not saying it's a badly written; I’m saying it
needed to be edited and abbreviated—most of the novel is not over-written.
Turtle is a wonderful
character: believable, likable. The reader feels concern for her, anxiety about
her safety, as the narrative moves forward. I was sure that a woman had written
this novel because of its delicate and perceptive handling of Turtle’s
character, because of the concern with child abuse, child rape. It was a
surprise to discover that it was written by a man. I don't know much about the
psychology of child abuse victims or child rape victims, but Tennant makes you
believe in the situation and the characters he describes. He makes you
understand how Turtle could be the hostage of her father's ghastly nature. He's
a monstrous character, and yet the surprising and in some ways almost
miraculous fact about this novel is that it takes you a while to realize the
extremity of his monstrousness.
All the people in the novel
talk as if they have been taking modern literature classes for years—this
includes teenaged boys, their parents, Turtle’s father. The atmosphere in those moments is
artificial.
[1]
New York Times, August 29, 2017 (https://www.nytimes.com/2017/08/29/books/review-my-absolute-darling-gabriel-tallent.html?mcubz=1).
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