It takes a village
WILSON’S PERFECT LITTLE WORLD IS A DYSTOPIAN VISION
Perfect Little World By Kevin Wilson Ecco 352 pp; $ 33.50
The question you will immediately ask upon reading the back cover of Kevin Wilson’s new book is: “Where does he come up with this stuff ?” Although you may decide to open it up to see how the complicated premise of Perfect Little World turns out, it is the strange personalities and inherit lessons within that will keep the book forefront in your mind for days following finishing it. This combination of the strange, yet throughout-provoking, creates one of those stories that never really leaves you — I suspect that a scene may pop into your mind 10 years from now as if it were something you saw on the news, yet with a pang of nostalgia.
The first character we meet is Izzy Poole, a straight- A highschool student who has accepted her life: a mother who died when she was young and an alcoholic father with whom she has hardly exchanged 10 words since; her only pseudo-parent is Mr. Tannehill, with whom she works in the kitchen of a popular barbecue joint.
Izzy is content to live this way until the events of the novel begin to unfold: on her graduation day she reveals to her unstable art teacher — and lover — Hal Jackson that she is pregnant. After asking her not to have the child, they split and he ends up in an institution, where he takes his own life.
Somewhere on another side of the country, Doctor Preston Grind takes a meeting with billionaire Brenda Acklen without any knowledge of why she’s requested it. She’s taken an interest in his book, The Artificial Village, in which Grind describes practi- ces of collective parenting, and Acklen wants to completely fund a new study led by him.
Dr. Grind carefully selects 10 couples to live and parent their children together in a home where none of the children will know who their biological parents are. Selecting people without the means to give their children what they need, and without family ties, he creates The Infinite Family project of which Izzy becomes a member.
It soon becomes clear that Dr. Grind may have ulterior motives, ones he does not admit even to himself. His own parents were famous child psychologists — famous for the way they raised him, with the Constant Friction Method of Child Rearing. Trying to create a world for their son where he would know how to deal with pain, they made sure he lived in a world that was constantly challenging him: from taking him out of his crib during the night as a baby to handcuffing him in a room with a key hidden away. Their study seemed to work, until Dr. Grind lost something that he could not figure out how to live without — his wife and son.
Wilson’s novel is, more than anything else, a comment on social construct. On top of looking at outward factors to blame, this novel also asks us to look inward. Emotions are tightly knit into this tale, with those of Izzy and Dr. Grind under constant evaluation as they grapple with how they will be able to continue their lives after all that’s happened to them.
Izzy, who has grown up without a lot of love, knows only one thing for sure — her love for her son Cap — and she will do everything she can to protect him. Dr. Grind doesn’t know how to go on without his family, so he creates a new one, one that he needs to work no matter what.
Child psychology plays a large part in the novel, and although Dr. Grind’s terrible early life is fictionalized, the theme of child rearing’s dark side is strong. The book asks how important the first 10 years of a child’s life are in forging who they become. It also challenges notions of who counts as a parent: Izzy certainly feels closer to those with whom she has no blood ties than those with whom she does. It is Mr. Tannehill who teaches her more about life than her own father. Families have been the focus of Wilson’s last two books ( including his bestseller The Family Fang), and in them he shows family’s importance but also how they can tear one another apart — intentionally or otherwise.
Although Hal (the art teacher) is not alive for most of the novel, his art — setting different objects on fire, photographing them and then painting them — stays with Izzy. “I keep thinking I can find the moment when the object is not what it once was but it also isn’t ash yet,” he once told her. “I want to find the moment that the fire transforms us. I never do though.” Izzy and Dr. Grind are finally able to do this within the project, to find the moment that they are transformed from damaged goods into who they will become.
Wilson’s intriguing, dystopian world leaves us with one moral that rings true for all families: whether created or born into — they are never perfect, but they are everything.