Death In Her Hands by Ottessa Moshfegh

        I’ve heard the hype around Ottessa Moshfegh for a few years as a new voice for the messy woman trope, hyped up in particular by both BookTok and my students but validated by some of my esteemed readerly friends. I was very kindly gifted Death in Her Hands as my introduction to her oeuvre. I’m told it’s her worst work, but even so I found it a really interesting project.

The book starts with a note: “Her name was Magda. Nobody will ever know who killed her. It wasn’t me. Here is her dead body.” A compelling opening. Ripe for an unfolding murder mystery. But instead Moshfegh draws from and subverts the mystery genre in equal measure to a really interesting effect.

The investigation reads more like a dream sequence that would feel at home in a Murakami novel—or more accurately, The Unconsoled by Kazuo Ishiguro, in which the central character is perpetually waylaid by half-formed plots and doubtful illusions. Each step of the journey—or in this case the investigation—seems to be interrupted before reaching completion, never quite circling back into coherence. A vital clue is found only to be interrupted by her dog going missing; the quest for a missing dog is interrupted by a fainting spell, and so on. From the first pages of the book I trained myself to expect irresolution—and that is the best mindset to go in with; I don’t expect anyone who wants a whodunnit will close this book with a sigh of satisfaction.

That’s because Death in Her Hands is largely a book of possibility. At the level of the word, of the sentence, events are framed in the conditional while perpetually denying resolution. Consider this passage as emblematic of what the book achieves; I’ll take the liberty of bolding the words that point towards equivocation:

If any of them knew Magda, if they cared about her, they hadn’t noticed she’d been gone. She hadn’t shown up for work. Maybe she’d gone out, with Blake, I supposed, and they had gotten in some trouble. [...] What nerve he had, leaving Magda’s body all alone. He must have been involved somehow. I wasn’t an expert in crime, but I knew this much: Black was a suspect. He had contact with Magda’s dead body. He knew something. It wasn’t me. His denial only made him seem scared and paranoid. And if I knew anything about paranoia, it was that it sprang from guilt and regret. Always. I’d seen it clear as day in Walter when we were having our troubles. “You’re crazy,” guilty people say. They try to dismiss your inquiries. “You’re paranoic,” Walter insisted. Guilty people will try to divert your attention. “Vee vere just talkink! I vas just helping her!” he said. Nobody will ever find her. Blake was guilty of something, whether of murder or neglect or stupidity, I didn’t know yet. If there were any actions to be taken, the first would be to find that boy. I had little to go on. But then again, the town was small. He was literate, that Blake. I knew that at least. And he had enough common sense to know if someone was alive or not. He must have felt Magda’s wrist or throat. I wondered how long he’d waited, wishing or not wishing for her heart to beat. (62)

Look at the language here: “if”s, “or”s, “maybe”s, and if we’re feeling generous the speculative “must have.” There’s a vagueness and hedging: “I wasn’t an expert,” “I didn’t know yet,” “I had little to go on,” or “then again.” The mist of uncertainty permeates the novel.

As the story progresses, the central character, 70 year old Vesta Gul becomes a detective, using the search engine Ask Jeeves (RIP) at the library to search for tips on solving murders and writing detective stories. It’s somewhat comic, this elderly woman playing detective, but there’s a surreal and metafictional quality to the work. For example, in the lengthy passage I quoted above, she notes that “paranoia [...] sprang from guilt and regret” (62). In this section, she’s alluding to her husband’s adultery, which is later shown to be quite extensive. His gaslighting seems to be a contributing factor to her paranoia. Elsewhere, she also discusses how he was so good at solving murder mysteries and said how obvious the solutions were if you knew the conventions—the culprit was always the person just west of center. With these details, I myself was sprung into a paranoiac mentality: is Vesta gaslighting us and she really knows who killed Magda. Is her husband himself the person just west of center, guilty of taking the life of one of his student devotees? 

The surrealism of the text is predominantly a result of Vesta’s strange relationship to narrative. Throughout the book, Vesta develops theories of who is involved in the mystery, developing a list of suspects from around town. She invents Blake, the young man who was trying to help the rebellious (but vulnerable) Magda. Magda ends up renting a room in Shirley’s house as a favour but Magda also works a job caring for an old man and maybe being romantically involved with his son and at least one other abusive man. It’s the kind of network of associations that would feel like Laura Palmer’s in Twin Peaks. The strange part, though, is that Vesta encounters these people as if they are real. In following Blake’s tracks, she finds a poem in William Blake’s poetry that has been underlined in a library book and then uses that to guide her. When a woman locks her car keys inside her car and asks Vesta for help, Vesta stumbles into the Shirley she invented. The creep at the gas station has the same name as the one she invented for one of her creeps. The coincidences abound, so much so that it can’t possibly be true. It’s as though Vesta enters in and out of the narrative she herself invented and it brings doubt as to whether any of this is real.

As a brief aside, I can’t help but notice that Vesta Gul continually corrects people on her name throughout the book. It is specifically not said as Vesta Gool but as Vesta Gul. Either way, it has an odd resonance with the word “vestibule” and I can’t help but feel that the central character of Death In Her Hands is in a similar kind of liminal space, both in- and out- of the stories she enters. When she’s filling in character sheets for the people in her mystery story (she was told she needs a list of suspects), she invents a “ghoul” for the story (again, oddly resonant with her name—implicating her, perhaps, in her own story). When she writes the name though, the ‘u’ and the ‘l’ blend together into a ghod combo and thereafter she names the unseen shadowy monster in the story as Ghod. Ghod exerts agency and chaos into her story—it’s only later that she encounters a police officer and equates Ghod with the law. 

The encounters Vesta has with other characters often reads as stilted and awkward, which adds to the atmospheric oddity of the text. For example, at one point, Vesta discovers that her car won’t start and when she calls a repairman she discovers her wires have been cut. The repairman suggests maybe she cut her own wires. The conversation orbits the possibility of repair before the repairman gets metaphysical. She asks, “can you fix it?” and he says, “It can’t be fixed. What you have here is irreparable damage. Don’t you know there is no life after death? You know this it, don’t you? You aren’t going anywhere” (198). It seems to me a leap that no real person would make at that moment. As they continue their conversation, Vesta suggests she’ll walk if she has to and he responds with the ominous, “All I can say is that when you walk into that forest, that forest is all you’ll see” (198). It’s the kind of aphoristic line that could be translated into the Twin Peaks red room. There’s an uncomfortable communion between Vesta and her townsfolk. Vesta approaches a house looking for her dog and stumbles upon a death party for a woman who is not seeking cancer treatment and has invited her friends to gather for a last hoorah. The two talk about being neighbors (everybody mentions that Vesta lives on “the old Girl Scout camp”) and they share memories. The woman says she went there when she was little and had intended to buy it. She refers to the ghost story that circulated about it. Vesta is incredulous: “‘Ghost story?’ I said. I tried to laugh, but it came out as a cackle” (207). The both of them seem to be ghosts themselves, in that liminal space between life and death. The woman says, “Ghod told us your name once. What was it again? He’ll be here later. We’ve cast him as the lead investigator with instructions to come dressed as Sherlock Holmes. But he’ll probably show up in his uniform, as always” (207). There are layers of fiction here: Vesta has invented the character Ghod, embodied him in the police officer, and now a new character is referring to him in the same way despite there being no way she would have that knowledge. Within this fiction, the woman is hosting a party in which everyone comes in disguise: a murder mystery party is its own fiction within the fiction.

There are several other motifs that play into this idea of guiding fictions. Early in the book we’re introduced to Pastor Jimmy, a man with a radio show offering religious guidance. Vesta listens to his fire and brimstone advice and internalizes his voice. She calls in to the show and struggles to express herself but Pastor Jimmy attempts some guidance; later, when she talks to the repairman later on, he reveals that Pastor Jimmy has been dead for years and that all the shows are reruns (198). Pastor Jimmy is presented as an illusion responsive to the inner workings of Vesta’s imagination. When her dog Charlie goes missing, Vesta considers enlisting (the maybe fictional) Shirley’s help and then the police’s help. From there, she imagines a whole scenario and uses it as justification for not following up. Again, the sentences switch to the conditional tense:

But I had no phone, and involving Shirley would only complicate things. I could imagine the kind of laughter I’d get if I called the police.
“Crazy old lady, the old Girl Scout, her dog went missing,” they’d say around the station.
“Wonder where he went.”
“Dumb old mutt.”
“Probably ran away. Who’d want to stick around with that old hag, that monster, that witch? Hansel and Gretel, is that the story? The crazy old hag who lived alone in the woods? Or am I thinking of Goldilocks? Whatever it is, she’s a bitch, that’s for sure.”
Brutes, those cops were, talking about me that way. Didn’t they know I’d been the wife of a scientist? Didn’t they know I’d worn the most elegant silk blend dresses, gone to dinners at the university? The wife of a state senator had complimented me on my hairdo. They’d printed my picture in the paper a few times. I’d sung in a chorus at college. I’d studied Japanese calligraphy. (187)

Vesta imagines what they would say. Even when she imagines what they say, even in her imagination they’re uncertain: the dog “probably” ran away. The way Vesta imagines herself in the eyes of others is pretty critical. She characterizes herself as the monster of a fairy tale before trying to counteract it with who she actually was. Also worth noting, though, is how often these assessments are all phrased as questions.

In fact, one of the novel’s key questions is that of identity. Who is Vesta? Who is Magda? Are any of these people actually people? Early in the text, Vesta narrates that “It was important to keep an open mind. I could be anybody” (17). She’s referring to the note she found, but there’s a doubling here. She continues to say that “there was something to be gleaned from the serious and youthful ballpoint pen, the precise print, the strange nonadmission, the nobodyness of I. Blank.” (17). She corrects people on her name “to avoid confusion.” There’s a motif of names and their implications—even her dog is named Charlie so that “when we were feeling regal, [she]’d call him Charles” (17). 

A key aspect of the book is Vesta’s relationship with her dog. Her dog is somewhat emblematic of her own experiences. One day her dog Charlie brings her a dead bird. Despite an apparent disjointedness, there’s a clear parallel here. Death is brought to Vesta in the form of a note, but also in the form of a bird. Death is dropped at her feet: “That morning with the meadowlark was, perhaps, a significant day for Charlie. He discovered his innate purpose, some instinct kicked in. But what could I possibly want with that dead bird? I hadn’t shot it down, nobody had. It was an odd thing to feel impelled to retrieve. Such are instincts. They aren’t always reasonable, and often they lead us down dangerous paths” (15). Vesta and Charlie are aligned through a compulsion to retrieve a dead thing. She recognizes the danger for Charlie, but ignores the danger for herself. She doesn’t seem to recognize her own compulsion even in the same moment: “I kept my eyes on the path on the walk home, one hand holding Charlie’s leash, the other tucked inside my coat, grasping the note, to keep it safe, I told myself” (15). She also reflects on Charlie’s origin. She explains how Charlie was discovered two months ago in black duffel bag on the riverbank and how he was the only one of the litter that survived. She narrates, “I spent a minute piecing that together” (17). Vesta stitches reality into place. “From then on,” she says, “I pictured myself as the one who had come upon the black duffel in the mud, under the bridge where the river thins, and that I had unzipped the bag to find a huddled swarm of heady, raisin-coloured pups, only one of them breathing, and that one was mine” (17). She recreates the moment, a revisionist moment where she can reforge her relationship with Charlie and with her sense of self.

If I were to sum up the book’s core motifs, it’s about identity, imagination, paranoia, death, storytelling, and so on. In one moment, Vesta loads Charlie into the car and decides not to go lock her cabin door: “No, I wouldn’t. There was nobody lurking out there in the woods, I told myself. Suspicion invites danger, doesn’t it?” (48). Vesta recognizes that suspicion invites danger—but can’t help herself but feel that suspicion everywhere she goes. She brings danger to herself while recognizing that if you “keep the imagination soft and happy, [...] only good things will come” (48). If this mystery is all a matter of perspective, Vesta might project a better outcome with a shift in her mindset. In that passage, she proceeds to list all the dead things out in the woods, starting with Magda and then working towards mice and rabbits that are never found and none of them were ever buried. “What’s so wrong about that?” she asks herself, “Nothing. God’s green Earth, I told myself” (48). There’s a strange distancing taking place where Vesta tries to downplay the death of a human being. Yet, she returns. She obsesses. She tries to find a solution that will bring coherence to this death.

Death In Her Hands is a dream sequence—perhaps more accurately described as a nightmare—where dream logic guides us through a series of detours. It creates an atmosphere of suspension and paranoia where not even Vesta is above suspicion. It’s worth noting that her beloved dog becomes terrified of her after it returns from being missing. The line between the imagined and the real blurs, leading to an irresolution that would not satisfy many readers, though it worked for me. The novel reads as almost an anti-mystery. The note points to a body, but ultimately we’re left without corpus delicti. As much as Vesta follows the rules, the clues never add up. So here we are. Adrift.

Happy reading!

Milkman by Anna Burns

    When a novel is so completely original, clever, and fresh, it’s hard to know exactly where to start with a review. Falling into such a category is Anna Burns’ Milkman. While I finished it nearly a week ago, I haven’t been able to bring the right words to the experience. I’ll venture to begin, instead, by explaining why it was necessary for me to buy and read this book. It’s a delightful tripartite:

1. The vibrant pinks and oranges of the cover.

2. Its status as a winner of the Man Booker Prize (2018).

3. The back of the book, where the first two sentences read as follows: “In an unnamed city, middle sister stands out for the wrong reasons. She reads while walking, for one.”

    Being an aficionado of reading-while-walking, the book called my name. Despite the fact that people read from their phones while walking all the time, strangers routinely make comments—for better or for worse—on my apparently odd behaviour, so I felt a personal connection to the central character and the author immediately.

    The main character’s relatable affectation was the tip of the iceberg. As I dove into the book, I found the writing style, characters, plot, and themes of the text completely engrossing. Even though the pace of the book is slow, the narratological style repetitive, and the digressions into minutiae numerous, I felt compelled to read on. The compulsion is rare to find and, to me, is a good indicator of how finely wrought this book is.

    Allow me to begin with the premise of the story. Despite not being named, the milieu is central to the novel. The country is under immense political and religious duress; ideological divides and the resultant instability mean that many teenage citizens try to restore control over their lives by joining with local paramilitaries—and most families have at least one dead child as a result. Knowing that Burns hails from Northern Ireland biases me somewhat into believing that the story takes place in the Troubles of the 1970s, but the story has a universal quality that could easily set the story in areas of post-war strife like, say, Berlin or Palestine. Ultimately if Burns had wanted this to be an Irish-specific tale, she would have identified the city by name.

    Despite having a historical framework, I found myself frequently destabilized by the little details that pop up. For instance, middle sister’s maybe-boyfriend (this is how he is referred to throughout the novel) obtains a car part that comes from “across the water” (i.e. it’s a supercharger from a Bentley) and it’s seen as a scandal. There seems to be mistrust between both the U.S. and Russia, positioning the characters as in the midst of the Cold War, though their conflict is more localized—more immediate.

    These factors create an atmosphere of paranoia and suspicion. The words of middle sister establish the framework for the story succinctly: 

“These were knife-edge times, primal times, with everybody suspicious of everybody. You could have a nice wee conversation with someone here, then go away and think, that was a nice, unguarded conversation I just had there — least until you start playing it back in your head later on. At that point you start to worry that you said ‘this’ or ‘that’, not because ‘this’ or ‘that’ were contentious. It was that people were quick to point fingers, to judge, to add on even in peaceful times, so it would be hard to fathom fingers not getting pointed and words not being added, also being judged in these turbulent times, resulting too, not in having your feelings hurt upon discovering others were talking about you, as in having individuals in balaclavas and Halloween masks, guns at the ready, turning up in the middle of the night at your door” (27-28).

The characterization of the milieu as “knife-edge” times is just excellent, and the way that middle sister characterizes those knife-edge times is wonderful. I love the deployment of a vague haze, like her use of ‘this’ or ‘that’, devoid of concrete examples. As a bit of a missed opportunity I think it would have been great to say that you worry about saying ‘this’ or ‘that’ not because ‘this’ or ‘that’ were contentious but because you  were meant to say ‘that’ when you said ‘this’ and ‘this’ when you were supposed to say ‘that’. The style encapsulates the vague haze of the society and the adopted anonymity when times are so uncertain. Characters are generally not given names; for one, certain ‘cultural’ names are forbidden, but also, given the rates of premature death, why give names beyond ‘eldest sister’ or ‘second brother-in-law’.  

    Ultimately, these knife-edge times drive the plot. While reading-while-walking, middle sister is approached by Milkman (not a milkman), who seems to have intimate knowledge of her and her family’s history. His presence is a threat in its own right, but it incites rumours that he and middle sister are in a relationship, that she is in high political standing, locally, by proximity to a paramilitary, and so on. Middle sister is already “beyond the pale” because of her reading-while-walking habits, but Milkman stalking her now makes middle sister’s mom paranoid that she isn’t getting married, incites doubt in her maybe-boyfriend (who, incidentally, it’s intimated will be on the receiving end of Milkman’s car bomb), and her local entanglements get increasingly complex.

    The main beats of the story are simple. Each chapter is rooted in one of middle sister’s interactions with Milkman and Anna Burns turns the screw each time. That said, the tangential stories provide rich characterization and ‘world-building’, as it were. Lest I give the impression that the book is predominantly historico-political, that serves as the backdrop but the story is essentially human.

    For instance, middle sister is in a maybe-relationship with maybe-boyfriend and the two are in perpetual, understated conflict. They have a routine, but not being necessarily official nor planning necessarily to wed, their relationship is in perpetual peril. It’s also a secret, which is a cause for her mother’s anxiety and feeds into the rumours that middle sister is involved with Milkman. There’s a colourful cast of characters, each of which inspire sympathy and repulsion. Off-putting to the neighbourhood, one boy is always singing doom and gloom about nuclear weapons—until he’s murdered. Another girl poisons people in the neighbourhood for mysterious reasons. The characters are provided with rich backstories in nearly every case. Even maybe-boyfriend’s parents are given a darkly comic background that made me feel invested in their lives. They decide to abandon their children to pursue careers in showbusiness:

“They had written a note, said the neighbours, but had forgotten to leave it; indeed primarily they had forgotten to write it and so had written it then forwarded it back from their undisclosed destination when they reached it, not deliberately undisclosed but because they hadn't time or memory or understanding to put a sender's address at the top. According to the postmark it was not just a country over a water, but a country over many, many waters. Also, they forgot their former address, the house they'd lived in for twenty-four years ever since getting married until twenty-four hours earlier when they left. In the end they'd hazarded the address in the hope the street itself might sort things out for them and, thanks to the resourcefulness of the street, it managed to do just that. It forwarded the letter to their offspring and this letter, after it had done the rounds of the neighbours before reaching the hands of the brothers, said: 'Sorry kids. Seeing things in right relation we should never have had children. We're just off dancing forever. Sorry again - but at least now you're grown up.' After this, there was an afterthought: ‘Well, those of you who aren't grown up can be finished by those of you who are - and look, please have everything- including the house.' The parents insisted their boys take the house, that they themselves didn't want it; that all they wanted was what they had with them — each other, their choreomania and their numerous trunks of fabulous dancing clothes. The letter ended, 'Goodbye eldest sone, goodbye second elder sone, goodbye younger sone, goodbye youngest sone - goodbye all dearr lovelyy sones’ but with no signature of ' parents' or 'your fond but lukewarm mother and father'. Instead they signed it 'dancers', then there were four kisses, after which the sons never heard from their parents again. Except on TV. Increasingly this couple would be on TV, because they proved themselves, despite middle age, exceptional youthful ballroom-dancing champions. (39)

Apologies for the lengthy passage, but I think it reflects a few of the quirks of Burns’ writing. There’s the repetitive language and sentence structures that recycle details over and over—perhaps there’s a Beckettian lilt to the work in that respect—that comes across as hypnotic, but also lively and full of personality. The ‘voice’ is so distinct, and in addition there’s a dark humour to the passage. The seriousness of the parents abandoning their children is undercut by their blasé attitudes as dancers and I find that disconnect fantastic.

    The disconnect also works in reverse. In a chilling flashback scene, middle sister’s father is in hospital and the perception of humour skews the scene darker. It’s revealed throughout the text that her father was mentally unwell, and middle sister has a distinct memory of a confession—a secret shared between them. When talking about his pain, Da mentions his backside, and “wee sisters giggled” (56). He talks about how the pain “kept coming, kept repeating, kept being awful, [his] whole life through” (56). He then expounds on his life in a self-effacing, self-abnegating way that is just awful to witness, particularly because middle sister’s mom is determinedly unsympathetic to Da’s mental illness. He explains, “there had been a recklessness, wife [...] an abandonment, a rejection of me by me that had begun years earlier — I was going to die anyway, wouldn’t live long anyway, any day now I’ll be dead, all the time, violently murdered — so he may as well have me, ‘cos he knew all along he was going to have me, couldn’t stop him from having me. All shut down. Get it over with. Not going freshly into that place of terror, which was why, wife, it never felt right between me and you” (56). It becomes clear that Da underwent significant sexual trauma in his younger years, but wee sisters don’t understand, so they continue to giggle throughout the scene. The wee sisters find humour in funny words (like “buttocks”), but are oblivious to the darkness taking place at the moment: 'Did he,' da then asked, looking straight at me and seeming for a moment fully to comprehend me, ‘Did he ...rape you, brother ... as well?’ (56). The complex family dynamic is given some additional tension, but the psychological turns are best left to the author.

    The entire novel, though, explores the psyche of characters so beautifully, with middle sister being developed particularly well. Her personality (and the milieu) comes through in the narration with an odd mix of sophistication and naivete. For instance, her vocabulary is advanced but conceptually she is still sometimes woefully innocent—for example, she sees her own life as being constructed by other peoples’ rumours, but doesn’t recognize that the same might be true of poisoner girl. That said, her consciousness of how things are is generally profound.

    There’s a section I found absolutely heart-wrenching, but too long to quote in its entirety here. Essentially, middle sister goes through a conscious process of prolonged dissociation. She actively chooses to render herself an expressionless void of a person. She recounts the process of emptying herself out over several uninterrupted pages. She likens the process to the adage told when making a face: you’re going to get stuck like that. That happens to her spiritually. Not wanting to confirm or deny rumours about her, she responds to everything with “I don’t know.” It’s a tragic passage that is elevated by Burns’ deft hand. [cf. pp. 175-179].

    Essentially, the section reflects at the individual level what middle sister had noticed of their society as a whole, but you go in with the expectation that she is somehow different, beyond the influence of her society’s deadening effect. She notes, “So shiny was bad, and ‘too sad’ was bad, and ‘too joyous’ was bad, which meant you had to go around not being anything, also not thinking, least not at top level, which was why everybody kept their private thoughts safe and sound in those recesses underneath” (91). Incidentally, this is brought up in relation to her father: “We thought, because we were told, that whenever he disappeared he was off to long hours of work, long days of work, lengthy weeks of work in some faraway town or country or, if not that, that he was seeing some specialist doctor far away because of the pains he was getting in his back. But it was mental hospitals, and it was mental breakdowns, which meant cover-up, which meant shame, which meant even more shame in his case because he was a man” (91).

    In any case, the novel revolves around themes of perception and what we are willing to admit to ourselves. In one crucial scene, a French teacher challenges one of the most basic truths we tend to learn: the sky is blue. They read a poem that gives a poetic response to the sky and nobody is willing to admit that more is possible. Using such a juvenile example as a starting place, it becomes emblematic of the text’s deeper themes: 

“Of course we knew really that the sky could be more than blue, two more, but why should any of us admit to that? I myself have never admitted it. Not even the week before when I experienced my first sunset with maybe-boyfriend did I admit it. Even then, even though there were more colours than the acceptable three in the sky – blue (the day sky), black (the night sky), and white (clouds) — that evening still I kept my mouth shut. And now the others in this class — all older than me, some as old as thirty -– also weren’t admitting it. It was the convention not to admit it, not to accept detail for this type of detail would mean choice and choice would mean responsibility and what if we failed in our responsibility? Failed too, to the interrogation of the consequence of seeing more than we could cope with? Worse, what if it was nice, whatever it was, and we liked it, got used to it, were cheered up by it, came to rely upon it, only for it to go away, or be wrenched away, never to come back again? Better not to have had it in the first place was the prevailing feeling, and that was why blue was the colour for our sky to be. Teacher though, wasn’t leaving it at that. (70-71).

In rewriting that passage, it occurs to me that there’s a thematic connection to one of my favourite books of all time, Never Let Me Go by Kazuo Ishiguro. This refusal to admit what we secretly know—to both be told and not be told—that fills our lives with so much tragedy is illuminated here. The officially mandated colours of the sky are clearly insufficient, but because the characters feel their happiness to be so precarious that they dare not embrace that which is more beautiful. The idea of not being able to cope with the loss of the sky’s colours is a poetic, heartbreaking turn.

    The theme extends into their romantic lives. There’s a motif throughout the book of people having, essentially, a true love and then the person they actually marry for practical and political reasons. Again, its reminiscent of Never Let Me Go in that respect, but it’s articulated beautifully here in its own right. In particular, there’s a section at the end where middle sister’s mother is faced with the decision to pursue the milkman (not to be confused with Milkman, of course). He is probably her proper love, but then is essentially told by the local women to give him up so that a long-suffering woman can lay claim to him instead. It’s painful and sincere and just a beautiful turn in the final pages of the book. Incidentally, file this book under: “books that have a perfect final sentence.”

    Actually, there are so many excellent moments and vignettes throughout the book. When maybe-boyfriend criticizes middle sister for her voiding, it’s a powerful conflict. She narrates, “At first I was stumped which gave him time to fit in extra charges of an unattractive numbed state he had observed was creeping over me, that he felt was starting to invade and possess me, saying it was as if I was no longer a living person but one of those jointed wooden dollies that artists use in — which was when I had to stop him because I couldn’t bear for him to finish on my growing numbed condition only to start in on my face” (193-194). The fact that he turns on her for that is a powerful moment, followed up a few pages later [cf. 199-202] by him confronting her on her reading-while-walking habit.

    So, what is the problem with reading-while-walking? A number of characters, well-intentioned and not, challenge her behaviour. It’s largely framed as being apolitical, or anti-political, in a time that one cannot afford to be. Third brother-in-law, for example, speaks to her seriously not about Milkman, but about her reading:

“he embarked on a careful disquisition that I guessed he'd been having for some time in his head. This was on the subject of my reading-while-walking. Books and walking. Me. And walking. And reading. That thing again. [...] 'It's that I think, said third brother-in-law, 'that you should not do that, that it's not safe, not natural, not dutiful to self, that by doing so you're switching yourself off, you’re abandoning yourself, that you might as well betake yourself for a stroll amongst the lions and the might tigers, that you’re putting yourself at the mercy of hard and cunning and unruly dark forces, that you might as well be walking with your hands in your pockets–-' 'Wouldn't be able to hold the book then—’ ‘Not funny. he said, 'It's that anybody could sneak up. They could run up,' he emphasised. 'Drive up. Good godfathers, sister-in-law! They could dander up, with you — defences down, no longer alert, no longer strenuously reconnoitring and surveying the environment and if you’re reading aloud—’ [...] This was getting ridiculous. 'But if you're undertaking the unsafe procedure of reading-while-walking and cutting off consciousness and not paying attention and ignoring your surroundings…” (58).

I adore these passages (and there are several) where people voice their critiques. The idea that reading is positioned as a withdrawal is, in my mind, backward, but given appropriate attention as a criticism. I also love the phrasing and dismissive attitude of middle sister: “Books and walking. Me. And walking. And reading. That thing again” is just a perfect rejection of peoples’ criticism. When he later brings up the walking-while-reading criticism again, she starts to make objections: “‘Okay,’ I said. ‘’So if I were to stop walking-while-reading, and hands in pockets, and little night torches, and instead looked right and left and right again for dangerous, unscrupulous forces, does that mean I’ll end up happy?” (63). The sentence which follows is just brutal: ““It’s not about being happy,’ he said, which was, and still is, the saddest remark I’ve ever heard” (63). The way that Burns takes such a simple premise as walking-and-reading and transforms it into something so symbolic is finely crafted, especially when given voice by her central character. Again I find myself reflected in her:

“It was my opinion that with my reading-while-walking I was doing both at the same time. And why should I not? I knew that by reading while I walked I was losing touch in a critical sense with communal up-to-dateness and that, indeed, was risky. It was important to be in the know, to keep up with, especially when things here got added on to at such a rapid compound rate. On the other hand, being up on, having awareness, clocking everything—both of rumour and of actuality—didn’t prevent things from happening or allow for intervention on, or reversal of things that had already happened. Knowledge didn’t guarantee power, safety and relief—leaving no outlet for dispersal either, of all the heightened stimuli that had been built by being up on in the first place. Purposely not wanting to know therefore, was exactly what my reading-while-walking was about. It was a vigilance not to be vigilant, and my return to exercising with brother-in-law, that too, was part of my vigilance” (65).

You have likely inferred by now that this novel has a philosophical bent to it. I think—and I may be overreaching here—that classic literature walks the balance of the narrative, the aesthetic, and the philosophical. At times, the philosophical can be outright heavy handed (consider for instance the treatise George Orwell embeds into 1984). But the best novels have a gentle touch where the philosophy and the narrative compliment one another. In my mind, Burns has achieved that balance and Burns has created a classic. 

    The fog of war that surrounds the novel allows for all kinds of observations about perception, identity, fate, hope, and epistemology. I was drawn in particular to the reflections on perception and Burns’ suggestion of the jamais vu, a blanking out of that which cannot be accepted (in Ishiguro terms: being both told and not told). Middle sister is concerned about the renouncers forcing on her a comprehensive and thus conflicting opinion of them. She says:

“This is what happens when doors swing open on inner contraries. Impossible then, with all these irreconcilables, to account, not just politically-correctly, but even sensibly for oneself. Hence, the dichotomy, the cauterising, the jamais vu, the blanking-out, the reading-while-walking—even my consideration of whether to forgo the current codex altogether for the safety of the scroll and papyrus of earlier centuries. Otherwise, if unmediated forces and feelings burst into my consciousness, I wouldn’t know what to do” (113).

This willed lack of complexity is a compelling idea to consider from the perspective of epistemology and returns us once more to the idea of the sky having more than three potential colours. The way that Burns navigates the individual amid the political is so perceptive, so persuasive, I found it hard to resist. 

    Essentially. The intertwining of the milieu with the plot with the themes—and heck, even the narrative voice—makes the whole experience aesthetically gratifying in every respect, so much so that in attempting to the book justice I’m consistently failing. Milkman is a one-of-a-kind reading experience, though it would likely appeal to fans of Ishiguro for its more human themes, Roberto Bolaño’s By Night in Chile meets Miriam Toews’ a complicated kindness for its milieu, or even Beckett or Joyce for its language. Being a book so finely honed and being a book like no other, I feel that Milkman has earned my highest praise. It’s the kind of book I want to force on all my most thoughtful friends and on all my most engaged students. I love its sweet, slow burn.

    Really happy reading! This book is an absolute achievement.

A Person of Interest by Susan Choi

    It’s hard not to get invested in books that start with a literal bang. I was admittedly a bit reluctant to read Susan Choi’s A Person of Interest out of concern that, if it were to disappoint me, it would tarnish my profound love of her more recent novel, Trust Exercise. Yet, A Person of Interest is gripping from its first sentence: “It was only after Hendley was bombed that Lee was forced to admit to himself just how much he’d disliked him: a raw, never-mined vein of thought in an instant laid bare by the force of explosion” (3).

    From there, the book then recounts the literal and figurative fallout of the blast, centering on Lee, an Asian-American mathematics professor who has gotten on in years and is steeped with jealousy, guilt, and resentments which come to the fore in the wake of the attack. It’s a mystery novel, of sorts, with a distinctly psychological bent and a touch of the family chronicle. In tone and structure I’d place it alongside Gone Girl and Michael Haneke’s Caché as filmic analogues. 

    The broad strokes of the plot are easy to describe, the nuances less so. In the present of the book, Lee’s University is attacked by a mail bomb, injuring the hip cutting edge computing professor. Lee gradually becomes implicated in the case after receiving himself a mysterious letter. As he tries to prove his innocence to the FBI, his guilty conscience makes him look more and more suspicious, more and more a person of interest. But why the guilty conscience? Because decades ago (during his graduate degree), he befriended Gaither, a deeply religious mathematics student, and his atheistic wife Aileen. Shortly thereafter, Lee carries on an affair with Aileen and eventually marries her following the birth of Gaither’s child. Back in the present, the mysterious letter that arrives claims to be out of friendship and concern for Lee after seeing him on the news. The unsigned letter, Lee recognizes, is Gaither—a taunt? A veiled confession?

    The novel is shrouded, masterfully, in doubt and suspicion. It is because Susan Choi has such an unparalleled understanding of the nuances of human behaviour and psychology that the characters in the book are so beautifully fleshed out, but also how Choi is able to manipulate her readers into plausible misdirects and profound uncertainties. Perhaps I’m reading Choi’s tricks from Trust Exercise retroactively here, but each of the characters were cast into my paranoid suspicions. Even in the first few chapters of the novel, Choi describes Lee’s routines leading up to the bombing and his experience on the day of. The narrator and Lee are not the same, but Choi blurs the line of their respective knowledge and as a result, there seems to be a suspicious intimacy between Lee and the bomber. Lee knows everything about Hendley’s routines—he would have the knowledge required to commit the perfect crime with the mail bomb. In turn, I felt myself casting aspersions on Lee—as do, too, his colleagues, when Lee skips out on visiting Hendley in the hospital. 

    Lee really doesn’t do himself any favours. The book is just painful watching him make terrible decisions one after the other; his actions are not those of an innocent man. Choi’s narrator explores the nuances of human psyche, painting Lee with every shade of survivor’s guilt and the guilt of his previous transgressions. Seeing the depths of Lee’s guilty conscience blur the line of his own guilt: could he be the culprit? Partway through the novel. Lee is asked to take a polygraph test and the scene perfectly replicates the feeling of anxiety—which was a great adrenaline rush as a reader. After building up my trust in Lee, it’s called into question yet again as the narrator reveals that Lee needed to rehearse his answers, was practicing his physiological responses, and so on. His anxiety projects his guilt and his small transgressions take on deeper significance. I’d like to cite a particular section, but the entire chapter is perfection. Just wait to get to page 178 or so. Trust me.

    Choi really knows how to turn the screw. Following the polygraph test, Lee keeps harping on the fact that he passed; the FBI agent, Jim Morrison (yes, that is his name), has to continually remind Lee that it’s not pass/fail but that there’s no evidence of deception. It’s both relief and not. The tension is fantastic, and I was in the Emergency Room holding in a nervous guffaw of laughter when a short while later Agent Morrison reveals an additional spin on the polygraph test:

“Your polygraph was sent to FBI headquarters, and they’ve reclassified it. They find the results inconclusive.”

“Inconclusive? But I passed. Gerry said so. You said so. I passed!”

“I did not say you passed. I told you what Gerry told me, which is that he saw no evidence of deception. That was Gerry’s conclusion. Headquarters arrived at a different conclusion. Their conclusion is that the test wasn’t conclusive.” (199).

The turn is already fantastic and then the most absurd turn happens. Be warned; there’s a long spoiler-y passage here:

“I’ve been doing what I do a very long time," Morrison recommenced, "and I've always believed, and always had that belief reconfirmed, that you never get if you don't give. And so, with you, I've given. I've given you respect—I think you're an extremely intelligent man. I've given you patience. I've given you the benefit of the doubt, when I could tell you weren't being completely forthcoming. And in return, I have gotten. I got the letter, after you said that you'd thrown it away. But the balance is very unequal. I have not yet gotten, in anything like the proportion in which I have given. You're a mathematician. You grasp what I'm saying. Yet in spite of all that, I'm going to give yet again." Here Morrison paused, as if to underscore his generosity. "I'm going to tell you something that very few people are privileged to know. In my business, which is the business of law enforcement at a federal level, there is a general belief—by this I mean it is generally shared, Lee, and there are very few who strongly disagree—that certain persons, of certain racial and cultural backgrounds, are immune to the polygraph test. The polygraph test is astoundingly accurate otherwise but with these groups it's worse than useless. It produces false negatives, always. It can never detect deception. No one really knows why; maybe these people don't have the base ethical orientation of our mainstream Judeo-Christians. Maybe they have a relative notion of truth, or they're lacking in guilt. Whatever the reason, we can't use the polygraph on them. Who are they? I told you no one outside law enforcement is aware of this problem. That's because it's not something we can walk around talking about. We can't polygraph Asians. The Chinese, Japanese, the Malaysians, the Indonesians. the Taiwanese are a maybe. Can't do Koreans, it doesn't matter which side. Can't do Pakistanis, Indians, Bangladeshis, and can't do any of the people of the region some call Western Asia and most people call Middle East. None of the Arabs, which is a very big problem, and for some funny reason Hasidic Jews also don't work, although once again, no one knows why." (199-200).

    I love this passage for so many reasons. First, the dynamic between Lee and Morrison is beautiful. There’s a tense and mistrustful alliance. The tough love good cop / bad cop routine Morrison employs adds tension to a scene where Lee has been ex-exonerated retroactively. Then, the revelation of the polygraph notes is a comic and outrageous turn that deflates the scenes before it so dramatically that it’s hard not to laugh. The irony of the dialogue is also great. The fact that Morrison suggests that Lee might be “lacking guilt” is comical, given we’ve seen him lingering in it for two hundred pages. Then, the blazon of races for whom the polygraph doesn’t work essentially rules out everyone except white people, which is funny in the same way Kafka is funny.

    But there’s another reason this moment stands out. There aren’t a ton of moments that call attention to Lee’s race, but it is in some ways critical to his experience and development of his character. Choi reveals details of his backstory tactfully without falling into the trap of excess that removes mystery and therefore interest. It’s clear that prior to moving to the United States, Lee had experienced bombings. There aren’t too many other references to his racial experiences, but it’s clear that his status as Asian American informs public perception of him following the bombing.

    The other key area where Lee’s race is somewhat important is when Aileen gets pregnant. When Aileen gets pregnant, she is married to Gaither but having an affair with Lee; if the child is Lee’s it would likely be more obvious that he is the product of an affair. To be honest, this part of the story gets quite a bit of attention, which is when the story felt most at a slog. The section was necessary for understanding the conflict between Gaither and Lee, but the other parts of the book were more compelling to me.

    The driving questions of the text are: who sent the bomb and why?

    There are a number of turns that cast doubt on all kinds of characters:

1. Is it Lee? He projects the experiences of Hendley to a T and perhaps the narrator will pull a sleight of hand like Trust Exercise.

2. Is it Gaither? The ominous note is suggestive.

3. Is it Gaither’s wife, and Lee’s former classmate Ruth? The letter was from a friend but unsigned—could Lee be wrong? Morrison said Lewis Gaither doesn’t exist…

4. Is it Mark? He goes to a library we know is associated with the bombing.

5. Is it a Fasano, Lee’s friend with whom he reconnects and bonds with over his own bombing experience?

6. Is it a more genuinely random attack?

By turns I found myself believing each of these things and Choi’s ability to create these narrative turns is simply excellent.

    I have to avoid saying too much more about the plot, but I’d like to highlight some of Choi’s other achievements. Her imagery is beautiful, especially with respect to flowers. I wish I’d taken more notes—apologies to Susan Choi for not citing her more directly here. One of the extended metaphors about flowers revolves around poppies—those that grow tallest get cut down. There’s a poetic sensibility in the writing that emerges in the literal-figurative blur. Lee’s colleague receives a literal bomb in the mail; Lee receives bombs in the mail repeatedly, though they are in the form of letters. Both are destructive.

    Both theme and character are rich. Late in the novel, Choi introduces Mark, Gaither’s son. While Choi reveals characters slowly and gracefully most of the time, she occasionally has passages that are illuminating in their directness. While Mark is on a trip, Choi establishes his character alongside philosophical reflection:

“Mark was aware that a crisis of unprecedented type and degree was fomenting in him. His lifelong habits of mere solitude, of having very few friends at any one time and never keeping any for long, speaking little of himself even when he was given the chance, were due only to a distance between him and others, not between him and himself. Hence his distaste for self-centred religion. Such believers, Mark felt sure, did not know themselves; they viewed themselves with a mix of fascination and dread; they made their business their own redemption as a way of avoiding any real confrontation with the stuff of their souls. Mark's father had been one of these: his aloofness from others was a function of his aloofness from self. But Mark felt he was more like his mother: tight-lipped towards others because all too aware of the unruliness of himself. Of course, Mark had never confirmed this with her; the members of the Taciturn Tribe don't jaw on about how they don't talk. But little less he understood Ruth, the one thing he felt sure of was that she understood herself and was just keeping quiet about it the way the that Mark did” (275).

Mark’s private reflection is grouped with a reflection on connection to others, a sense of identity, and the role of religion in peoples’ lives. There’s a similar perceptiveness in each of the characters so that each feels real and all-too-real. It’s almost uncanny how authentically the characters present themselves.

    The only exception, perhaps, is towards the end of the book. The story escalates, of course. Lee makes some decisions that are a little inconsistent with his character—as does his daughter. While the ending was still satisfying, it felt satisfying more in a James Bond kind of way than a Michael Haneke kind of way; when the ambiguity fades, it feels like just a mild betrayal to the rest of the narrative.

    Much of the novel dwells on the past, which is compelling to me, of course. Lee’s obsession with the past drives the story, both rightly and wrongly, and the shifting and relative significance of the past to people involved in it are fantastic. Our perceptions so oft are misaligned. Towards the end, a minor character offers a counter philosophy that is pretty interesting as a counterpoint to the rest of the text. When he’s asked, “If we don’t know the people we can from [...] how do we know who we are?” (276), he responds, “I can’t agree with you there. You’re not those people. Lighting a cigarette [...] I struck the match, but that flame isn’t part of me. It doesn’t need to ask me, ‘What is fire?’” (276), It’s a surprising philosophy that separates agents from their progeny—or their effects. Essentially, what we create is not a part of us, and what we’ve created is selfsame whether or not it is aware of us. The disconnect between origin and destination, means and ends, is questionable for any number of particular actions throughout the novel. Does Lee’s betrayal of Gaither produce the bomb, for instance? Is Lee the bomber by proxy? These questions are, at least for 90% of the book, open questions.

    All things considered, I have not done this book justice. It requires thoughtfulness and care to really do A Person of Interest justice. It’s a wonderfully nuanced and layered text well worthy of your time and attention. Choi has revealed herself once again (or rather, even prior to Trust Exercise) a master of the craft. Especially admirable since her books are so different from one another, Choi is one of the finest writers I’ve read in recent years.

    Enjoy the wonderful, visceral, incisive book that is A Person of Interest and I’ll see you on the other side.

    Happy reading!