Revisiting old horrors as a way of redemption
GIRL A Abigail Dean (Harpercollins $38)
English author Dean’s Girl A is a brutal riff on Tolstoy’s much-quoted — “All happy families are alike; each unhappy family is unhappy in its own way.”
Well, few in fiction could be as troubled as the Gracie family.
We meet our narrator, Lex Gracie, as she lands in England to sort out her mother’s estate. Her first stop is at the prison where her mother had been incarcerated.
When the prison warden says she’s sorry for her loss Lex fires back – “I’m not… so don’t worry about it.”
The warden alludes to the terrible things that happened to Lex and her siblings; a truly terrifying set of circumstances which first-time novelist Dean takes her time unveiling.
The last time Lex saw her mother was the day she escaped from her own home where she had been imprisoned for years and ran into the road begging a stranger to call the police.
Soon the whole country knows about what had gone on in the “house of horrors” on Moor Woods Road.
Her father committed suicide soon after the horror discovery, and her mother was sentenced to 25 years in prison.
And it’s this very house that Lex and her siblings are left in her mother’s will.
Outwardly Lex is an urbane New York lawyer but the effects of the trauma and abuse she suffered as a child, despite multiple counselling sessions, remains.
In her downtime she prowls bars, picks up men and demands rough, humiliating sex.
Incredibly Lex wants to turn the “horror house” where she suffered such abuse into “a communitybased project”, a “force for good”, but that requires getting her siblings — all of whom were placed with other families — to agree.
“I didn’t want it to be a novel about abuse, and about suffering,” Dean said in a recent interview.
“It is meant to be a novel about humanity and hope.”
What little structure there is here involves Lex visiting her damaged brothers and sisters in an attempt to get them to sign on to her community initiative proposal.
Unsurprisingly the surviving siblings are all struggling in their own way — one is in a psychiatric hospital hocking off “house of horror” memorabilia online to pay the bills, another is a Christian zealot, another shows signs of being an abuser himself.
As the novel progresses, Dean shifts timelines, slowly revealing Lex’s father’s increasing paranoia and mental illness.
Soon he’s covering the windows with cardboard and chaining his children to their beds.
Dean also delves into Lex’s own post houseof-horrors life (she is adopted at 15 by one of the detectives on the case).
It’s a tough and meandering read and Dean struggles balancing Lex’s coming-of-age story — there’s a tedious chapter about her first love affair with a fellow law student — with the more serious themes of trauma and recovery; still, expect to hear a lot more about Lex and and her unhappy clan — Girl A’s publishing rights sold for seven figures, and Sony Entertainment has snapped up the TV rights.