Rough sailing
Following up her awardwinning Apothecary series, Maile Meloy returns to the adult literary landscape with “Do Not Become Alarmed.” As most readers know, Meloy is no stranger to adult contemporary fiction, with two novels and two story collections prior to embarking into the magical world of middlegrade fiction. Over the past 15 years, the author has established her reputation as a deft storyteller with her impressive prose, economical delivery and skillful ventriloquism, convincingly inhabiting the perspectives of a wide array of characters. Meloy’s prose is democratic in that way; each character receives the similar treatment of emotional precision and deliberate economy. And with her new novel, this still holds true.
“Do Not Become Alarmed” opens with two cousins — film producer Liv and fulltime mom Nora, who are traveling with their respective families on a luxury vacation: Liv’s engineer husband, Benjamin, and their children, Sebastian (8) and Penny (11), and Nora’s African American actor husband, Raymond, and their biracial children, June (6) and Marcus (11). “The cruise ship towered over the dock in San Pedro like an enormous white layer cake, or a floating apartment building. The one thing it didn’t look like was an oceangoing vessel,” writes Meloy.
This holiday adventure is meant to provide a diversion for Nora, who is still grieving her mother’s death from pancreatic cancer over the summer. Initially, the opening scenes veer toward comedic commentary on the professional floating hospitality industry — similar to the ironic spirit of David Foster Wallace’s famous essay “A Supposedly Fun Thing I’ll Never Do Again” — but quickly Meloy’s fictional narrative takes a sharp turn into an entirely different terrain.
The wives and children — along with a newly befriended Argentine woman, Camila, and her two teenagers, Hector and Isabel — decide to go on a shore excursion at a port in Central America. A zip-line adventure! What could go wrong? Predictably, in a way, one misadventure buckles into another, after a collision causes a flat tire and the families end up on a deserted beach while awaiting their return ride to the ship. The tranquil spot appears idyllic enough as the kids race into the water and the guide, Pedro, furnishes frozen rum drinks. “The taste reminded Liv of a spring break of her lost youth,” writes the author, “sand on her sunwarmed body, a cute boy from Arizona she had hardly known, with a compact body like the guide’s.” In the meantime, Nora wanders into the nearby tropical forest with Pedro and Liv drifts off to sleep.
From the moment the children find themselves caught by a strong current, the narrative takes on a velocity, a palpable swoosh generated by countless plot turns, almost to the point of creating a bit of whiplash for the reader. Told in rotating third-person perspectives, Meloy moves among her ever-expanding cast of characters (20 in all) of different ages, classes and races, rarely missing a narrative beat. With ease and assurance, the author proves to be something of an acrobat in the way she tells this story of missing children and modern-day parenting. With each galloping chapter, it feels like Meloy is saying, “Hold on! It’s worth it!” And the author is right: Her high-wire act produces an original, expansive story that is memorable and vibrant without spinning wildly out of control.
There is diabetic Sebastian and his dangerous need for insulin. There is Noemi, an impoverished girl attempting to cross the border with her estranged uncle so he can deliver her to her parents in New York. There are flirtations and betrayals, rare birds and crocodiles, drug dealers and addicts, kidnappers and murderers, and even train hopping. Throughout all of this propulsive action, Meloy’s ability to write about children and teenagers shines on the page. Their authentic dialogue and observations produce illuminated pockets of insights and innocence amid the escalating chaos.
At the same time, Meloy never strays far from her exploration of parenting and its inherent fears, the firstworld privilege of growing up in the States versus the very different struggles of citizens in developing nations, and all that falls in between. The author excels at bridging the gap between these distinct worlds and never lets the reader forget where her characters come from. Meloy writes: “Benjamin lay in bed, unable to sleep, watching the video feed from the security cameras at their house in Los Angeles . ... The feed went straight to a server, so he could see their quiet house in real time from six angles on his phone. Nothing was happening. The street and the backyard and the covered pool were empty and quiet. His heart rate jumped once, when a skunk scurried past the lemon tree near the front door. And meanwhile his kids were missing, on the least adventurous vacation possible, in a supposedly safe country.”
In the end, the author leaves the reader with many questions about contemporary parenting: What is real fear? And what is manufactured fear? How do we measure our own pain against the others? Can we truly understand other people’s suffering and grief? Meloy doesn’t neatly answer all of these questions by the conclusion of her suspenseful novel, but she certainly leaves the reader a lot to think about.