San Francisco Chronicle - (Sunday)
New titles consider the personal and political struggle for LGBTQ acceptance and recognition.
If the town of Celebration, Fla., is a grotesque vision of an ideal Florida, then the unnamed city in Kristen Arnett’s “Mostly Dead Things” is the ideal vision of a grotesque one. This is no Disney paradise, no Karen Russell-esque dreamscape. This is gas station food and body odor and dirty flipflops, Publix bags and crammed trailers and stifling humidity. It is also the fetid swampland on which the Morton family, the clan at the center of Arnett’s debut novel, makes its claim.
Or at least, most of the Mortons. The novel opens with the patriarch’s suicide, a bullet in the brain in the middle of the family’s run-down taxidermy shop. Jessa-Lynn, his daughter and second-in-command, finds his note, which is really just a list of demands on her person. (A controlling type, this Prentice Morton, even in death.)
Jessa is queer and as tightly wound as her daddy (“Needing anything meant you were open to invasion,” she avers early in the novel, “It meant you had no control over yourself.”). She staggers under the weight of grief and responsibility, retreating into drinking, working and, occasionally, sex. Her brother, Milo, also retreats, to the point that he’s barely around for his kids. Their mother, on the other hand, embraces a decidedly nontraditional approach to widowhood, staging sexually explicit dioramas in the family storefront with her late husband’s taxidermy. “It highlights similarities between sex acts in the animal kingdom and those in modern suburbia,” she explains, but Jessa doesn’t want to hear it. This is partly because she’s distracted — an elegant gallerist has started sniffing around her mother’s work and Jessa’s bed — but mostly because she’s stuck in the past.
For there’s hurt in the past. (Isn’t there always?) The hurt comes from a girl, Brynn, the only person whom Jessa has ever loved and let love back. That the girl also happens to be her brother’s wife is a complication, but one that Jessa entered into willingly. Brynn took off years ago, leaving her two small children; neither Jessa nor Milo has recovered. In fact, they often seem more broken up about Brynn than they do over their dad. This may have something to do with the structure of the novel: Half of it is told in flashback, a choice which at times swamps the plot like a construction project in the Everglades. It may also have something to do with the first-person narration. Jessa is a ruminator, a loner, a hard drinker, and she prefers to nurse some wounds over others, the way a drunk repeats the same stories night after night.
But catastrophe has a way of shattering even the hardest of carapaces, and when it hits at the novel’s climax, Jessa’s overly thick skin begins to slough. Is love an “open wound, susceptible to infection,” as she proclaims at the beginning of her narration? Or “a thing that needed constant care”? Could it be both? “Mostly Dead Things” suggests, above all else, that love is not something to be conquered, killed, skinned and mounted. It is living, and a verb. What we do for love — be it build erotic buffalo sculptures in griefstricken homage, steal peacocks, raise someone else’s children, collect roadkill — is so much more powerful than what we think about it.
When it dawns on Jessa that her mother may be suffering as much as she is — maybe more so — she takes decisive action, and thereby liberates herself from a beery, melancholic fog. A first-person novel implicitly drives toward an internal change in the heart of its protagonist. In Jessa’s case, this change involves a reorientation to grief from something singular to something shared. It is not that the Mortons become one big happy family. It is that they become, after years of fracturing and isolation, once again, a family.
Sally Franson is the author of the novel “A Lady’s Guide to Selling Out.” She lives in Minneapolis. Email: books@sfchronicle.com