Of fairy tales, good and bad
Victor LaValle likes monsters. He knows horror and the supernatural can be rich turf for allusion, metaphor and reflection. The American writer’s last novel, The Ballad of Black Tom, was a recasting of H.P. Lovecraft, perhaps the most famed of literary conjurers. LaValle’s latest is The Changeling, a propulsive fiction of witches and trolls set in the confines of modern New York’s intersecting boroughs. He pitches the story as a fairy tale. (It says so right in the first sentence). We therefore have a male hero in the form of Apollo Kagwa, seller of rare books, son of a Ugandan-born emigre (like LaValle himself).
The damsel in distress is his wife Emma, who gives birth to their child Brian on a stalled subway train, and who rebels against that child in a fit of shocking violence, then disappears. Apollo’s quest is to find out what happened and restore what was lost.
However, “Fairy tales are not for children,” we’re told halfway through. “They didn’t used to be anyway. They were the stories peasants told to each other around the fire after a long day, not to their kids. “Now they
. . . have a moral,” he continues, “something to train those children in the new rules. Which is when they started turning to shit. A bad fairy tale has some simple goddamn moral. A great fairy tale tells the truth.”
Any reader should be suspicious of an author who telegraphs their intentions, who tells you how to read their stuff, especially when they imply it might be “great”. Beware the didactic. Because here, LaValle disobeys his own injunctions — the “bad fairy tale” with “some simple goddamn moral”.
The Changeling has some huge honking metaphors based in realistic concerns: racist policing, the perverse pervasion of social media, the anxiety of modern parenting (helicopter or otherwise).
By the time Apollo’s adventure to find his lost wife and child reaches a peak of desperation, we’re being told that, “When you have to save the one you love, you will become someone else, something else. You will transform. The only real magic is the things we’ll do for the ones we love.”
It’s enough to make even the most weak-kneed sentimentalist reach for the barf bag. Such soppiness betrays LaValle’s principal idea: to uncover the monsters that live in our midst, the demons that haunt everyday life.