Saturday, February 17, 2018

Review: "My Absolute Darling" by Gabriel Tallent


When Stephen King provides a blurb for a book, especially one for a debut work, you know you are in for something special, and with My Absolute Darling, the debut novel from Gabriel Tallent, you get just that, with this easily being one of the five best debut novels from last year. It is a daringly self-assured, poetic and frightfully suspenseful book about a young girl gaining the courage to stand up to the monsters in her life, both from inside her own head and in her own family. This is an impressive book that excels at many different kinds of writing styles that work to complement each other and the story that is told within and outside the mind of Turtle Alveston, our young narrator who possesses qualities of other classic heroines of literature but is very much an original creation. I couldn’t help being reminded of the beaten down but defiant narrators from the work of Daniel Woodrell, especially that of the put upon and tragic Shug Akins from The Death of Sweet Mister, whose trajectory is very similar to that of Turtle’s. The book begins with a scene of Turtle struggling over a vocabulary quiz with her father Martin Alveston, one of the scariest people to be rendered on the page in a very long time, quietly chipping away at her self-esteem under the guise of helping her. Every action of this slimy, methodical monster is made believable and scary. He is a smart man, evidenced by an early scene where he dresses down Turtle’s weakling principal, which makes the terrible things he does that much more terrible and that much harder for the wounded but equally methodical Turtle to escape from. A beam of hope shows itself in the form of Jacob, a boy one year ahead of her in school, whose free wheeling hippie family is the absolute antithesis of Martin’s apocalyptic nihilism. But in this regard, I felt Tallent does something very intriguing and very original here. These scenes with Turtle and the outside world, whether it is with Jacob and his friend Brett, or her helpful but anemic schoolteacher Anna, are all portrayed as rather ineffectual in the face of Turtle’s plight. It is clear she is stronger than them mentally, which is shown during Jacob and Brett’s introductions where they get lost in the woods and are tracked by Turtle as they further their predicament and further more through Jacob’s useless literary knowledge and an extended scene where both he and Turtle get marooned on a rock island. It is clear early on that these people will not be the ones to save Turtle from the clutches of Martin, who more than halfway through the book becomes otherworldly in his cruelty and abuse when he takes in another young woman named Cayenne, which propels the story into nightmarish territory. This is an exciting and thought provoking book, from its maddening bloody climax to its denouement, which lingers ever so eloquently on the precipice of hope and one of my favorite debuts of last year.

Rating: 5/5

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