Thursday, September 21, 2017

My Absolute Darling, by Gabriel Tennant

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.


at

No comments:

Post a Comment