From abuse and suffering, an extraordinary heroine rises
TURTLE Alveston might seem slow, but boy, is she tough. The adolescent heroine of Gabriel Tallent’s harrowing novel of abuse will not only break your heart, she’ll leave your mind reeling with her resourcefulness, stamina and humanity. “My Absolute Darling” is a major American debut that incorporates psychological realism of the highest order, juxtaposed with nature writing that at times is so lyrical, you might as well be reading poetry.
Turtle leads a life that boggles the mind. Surrounded by a lush but often unforgiving natural world on the California coast, her existence is controlled by her abusive father, Martin, who exploits her in the most savage ways imaginable. Domineering and vaguely charismatic, he has raised her in a violent and filthy home since the (probably suicidal) death of her mother, not allowing her to have relationships outside his relentless and intimidating dominion. He waxes philosophical at times, but so what? His thoughts are just a convoluted reflection of his warped and dangerous mind-set. He is tortured, and Turtle constantly pays the price for his misery. Turtle thinks, “I don’t even know what all right would look like. I don’t know what that would mean. At his best, we are more than all right. At his best he rises above all of it and he is more than any of them. But there is something in him. A flaw that poisons all the rest.”
The incest that he has inflicted on her is Turtle’s normal life, and Tallent offers the reader her Gordian knot of emotions of loyalty and disgust — a complicated swirl of conflicted feelings that builds in tension and suspense as Turtle makes more connections with the outside world. She even has romantic feelings for a high school boy named Jacob, whose privileged life gives Turtle a glimpse of something better, and his presence is a ray of hope that occasionally surfaces at key points in the novel. You are reminded that in an impossible situation, even when one wants to help it is often so hard to do so. Jacob also loves her — not the sick, perverted love that has made her life so hard but the kind of love that Turtle can hardly imagine, it is so removed from her domestic turmoil. When her father temporarily abandons her, she forgives him even in the face of more suffering and brutality.
Tallent is not just a good storyteller, he is a superlative describer of the natural world. But what sets him apart is his ability to bring to life how that natural world is interpreted, and what that reveals about the characters in his fiction. Martin looks at the landscape and declares, “It is all meaningless.” But instead of Turtle arguing against him with a predictable and precocious assessment of what it all means, Tallent surprises the reader with “she does not know why it would mean anything, or why you would look for meaning in it, and she does not understand why you would want it to be anything other than what it is, or why you would want it to be about you. It is just there, and that has always been enough for her.” And there you have it: a great and original fictional American heroine sweeping away in the most clear language imaginable most of the other traditions of both fiction and nature that don’t mean much in the face of real danger, real despair, real life.
To complicate matters, Martin picks up a 10-year-old girl named Cayenne, and the prospect of her being further victimized serves as a litmus test for Turtle’s moral compass. Cayenne is also a vulnerable victim who makes Turtle decide between looking out for herself or protecting the young girl from the horrific existence that she herself has endured. Seeing her thought processes is a searing reminder that the visual arts, including film, can never substitute for the power of language to convey the intricacies of thought and emotion, particularly those as important to our understanding as the victim of the most damaging of crimes.
Graphic but never gratuitous, Tallent forces the reader to dispense with the euphemistic psychology that allows us to minimize abuse and our responses to it. From one of her mother’s former friends to the well-meaning but ineffective schoolteacher who tries to help Turtle, Tallent dramatizes the utter failure of the adults around her to help someone who is so obviously in some kind of dire straits. And the live-and-letlive culture of Northern California is the perfect setting for the narcissistic tendencies of individuals to look the other way, often ironically returning to something “evolved” like meditation and leaving Turtle and her agony in the dust of their own agendas.
But this is not just the journey of a 14-year-old trapped in the worst of situations. This is social critique at its best, subtly interwoven in the tapestry of this stellar narrative. Busting both the educational and psychological establishments in one fell swoop, Turtle angrily confronts Anna, the teacher who is trying tepidly to intervene in her life with interrogations that refuse to address reality. Turtle says, “I hate these questions. Why do I think that? Because it’s true. It is so obviously true, so clearly true, that I don’t understand why you would ask. You only ask because you have nothing to contribute except open-ended questions, which isn’t teaching, which doesn’t help. Why do I think that? I think that because it’s true. You know it’s true.”
And so do we, each and every line. Intense, powerfully wrought and memorable, “My Absolute Darling” is an absolutely thrilling literary success and a novel that will stay with me for a very long time.