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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