The staff takes a springtime stroll down memory lane with three underappreciated classics.
Flight of the Falcon by Daphne du Maurier
Armino Fabbio is a professional tour guide in 1960s Italy. Dawn to dusk, his days are spent shepherding glassy-eyed tourists between hotels and cathedrals, Roman ruins and English tearooms. At the end of his workday that comprises the breathless first fifteen pages of the novel, Armino thinks, “When, as I thought, the lift doors had closed on the last of them, I sighed, and lit a cigarette. It was the best moment of the day.” His life here, pinging around southern Italy’s most stunning landmarks, is oppressive and spiritually dead. He remains detached: from the landscape’s powers of enchantment, from his clients—whom he regards mostly as livestock—and seemingly from his own personhood.
As he stands smoking outside of the hotel, Armino spots an old beggar woman on the steps of a nearby church. He’d seen this woman earlier in the day, when two members of his herd, retired teachers from London, expressed anger at her pitiful state (“But it’s absolutely scandalous . . . In England we . . .”). Despite his assurances that such a sight is “quite usual” in Rome, Armino has been distracted throughout the day by the woman’s resemblance to Marta, his childhood nurse. On the church steps, a sympathetic impulse leads Armino to place a 10,000 lira note into her hand (worth around $170 today). At her touch he is suddenly “seized with that sense of recognition, that link with the past which could not be explained.”
The woman is found murdered the next morning. Haunted by his potential culpability—was she killed for the money?—and the possibility that the woman really was Marta, Armino abandons his tour group to travel north to his hometown of Ruffano. This is only the first of many uncanny encounters Armino will have throughout the novel—uncanny in the sense of the unheimlich, a home that has certainly been lost yet makes its disfigured, unmistakable reappearance. And in embarking on this homecoming Armino seems also to embark on a backward flight through time.
The town Armino finds after decades of absence is indeed stretched taut between past and present. He’d last glimpsed Ruffano during the chaos of the Second World War, watching from the backseat of a Nazi jeep as his only known home receded. At the time of his departure, his father had died in an Allied prison camp, his elder brother had gone missing in action, and his recently widowed mother had just taken her first lover, a high-ranking Nazi officer. These ghosts remain upon his return as an adult, but a new chaos now reigns in Ruffano: modernity. Armino discovers new businesses thriving, old ones failing. The dusty local university has begun flourishing—to the chagrin of the dwindling humanities programs—due to its new department of commerce and economics. The C&E students, as they’re called, burst with the possibilities of the new world. They are so young, they do not remember the war.
But the pull of Ruffano’s warm-blooded, romantic history—a history involving sixteenth-century dukes, their palaces, and their bloody rivalries—finds its dogged advocate in the charismatic director of the Arts Council, Aldo. He is the man who oversees the university’s annual springtime festival, in which some illustrious moment in Ruffano’s past is elaborately reenacted. He serves as both stage director and recruiter, collecting student actors for his cause. I say “cause” because Aldo’s rhetoric seems more indicative of a militant cult than an arts extracurricular:
“You know the one thing that nobody in our country can endure?” he asked lightly, holding his glass against the light. “Not only our country but throughout the world, and right through history? Loss of face. We create an image of ourselves, and someone destroys the image. We are made to look ridiculous. You talked just now about humiliation, which is the same thing. The man, or the nation, who loses face either never recovers and so disintegrates, or learns humility, which is a very different thing from humiliation. Time will show how the Rizzios develop, and Elia, with the rest of the fry that make up this miniature Ruffano world.”
Aldo reaches this high threshold of drama just about every time he speaks, somehow without surpassing my threshold for disbelief. I am captivated by his character. I am captivated, more specifically I think, by du Maurier’s skills as a storyteller. Because there is something so concrete and expert and novelistic about this novel. Perhaps it has to do with the fact that this is one of du Maurier’s later works, her virtuosity as a writer well-established by its publication. Every symbol, every setting, is fully exploited for its potential. The spring festival—an elaborate mise en abyme—is a perfect example, as it becomes a kind of narrative multitool. Aldo’s mental unbraiding (like any cult leader, he toes the line between delusion and genius) is inextricable from the fracturing of performance and reality that occurs within this reenactment. “It’s easy, isn’t it,” Aldo once says to Armino, after Armino has forgotten to take off his period costume, “to go back five hundred years. Sometimes I lose all sense of time. That’s half the fun of it.” Time bends, but does not break, under du Maurier’s skilled hand. You will still find yourself bracing for the snap.
—Kate Bailey, Editorial Assistant
In Thrall by Jane DeLynn
High school senior Lynn has a lot on her plate: an outstanding application to Radcliffe College, a boyfriend who plays for the lacrosse team, a position on the yearbook staff. She’s also having an affair with her English teacher, Miss Maxwell.
In Thrall, by Jane DeLynn, tells the story of one closeted lesbian who is increasingly destabilized by secrecy and guilt. Writing in the first person, Lynn is more inclined to hide behind her diary-like “confessional” than risk earnest self-expression. (“I am a tragic hero because of my tragic flaw—” she feigns, “an excess of intelligence that dooms me to unhappiness.”) For Lynn, intellectual posturing is a fire blanket used to smother her burgeoning sexuality. Quick to remark on her aunt’s gay boyfriend or her best friend’s virginity, she futzes with everyone else’s business without ever really dealing with her own; it seems it’s easier for Lynn to live with her problems when she’s more attuned to the faults of others. (Comparison, then, is as much the supplier of joy as it is its thief.) Despite her hard-nosed persona, Lynn’s yearning for the future—where she’s not closeted and not miserable—lingers on the page like a bruise:
There should be a point in your life when it all came together, so you could say both that it was a good life and that it was enough—but the only time people seemed to realize this moment had arrived was after it had already gone . . .
Mourning the story of her life before she’s even lived it—such is the stuff of gay adolescence.
Lynn’s mind teeters on the knife’s edge that separates action and thought when in the company of Miss Maxfield—who has had several affairs with her students, who measures the frequency of her sex life on a year-to-year basis, whose love life is firmly rooted in the past. She’s a ghost story and a love interest at once, a lesson to Lynn in what happens when you let life happen to you. (Shortly after Lynn’s parents have discovered the affair, Miss Maxfield remarks that “as one gets older, the mind tends toward clichés.”)
Lynn’s affair with Miss Maxfield both complicates and affirms her early conception of lesbianism, which is barbed with her own homophobia, too; after Lynn’s first kiss, she wonders whether the act has “accelerated the development of my mustache, like a hormone.” She jokes with her friends about crew cuts and wearing green on Mondays and being a “lezbo.” In the company of others, Lynn picks at the truth of her queerness like a scab. She races to the punchline in order to take cover behind it. “I had been an official female homosexual for less than twenty minutes,” she quips after leaving Miss Maxfield’s apartment for the first time, “and already I had become a dangerous person.”
—Luke Gair, Associate Editor
Child of God by Cormac McCarthy
Necrophilia. Murder. Incest. Scalping. Cormac McCarthy’s third novel, Child of God, does not shy away from the macabre. In 1960s Appalachian Tennessee, antihero Lester Ballard’s story begins with upheaval. First, his late family’s farm is sold out from under him at auction. Then, he is accused of rape—a false accusation—and held in custody for a short time. Initially, Ballard seems like a run-of-the-mill deviant, taking pleasure in watching couples through their car windows and tormenting small animals. But Ballard’s darker inclinations culminate when he finds a couple parked at make-out point. They appear to have died in the midst of a sexual encounter. He pokes, prods, stares, and eventually rapes the woman’s corpse. Still not satisfied, Ballard takes her body home. McCarthy’s narrative style in the midst of these horrific events is striking: He doesn’t attempt to contextualize or describe Ballard’s intentions; he simply allows the story to unfold.
Just when I thought I had witnessed the marked shift from debauchery to depravity, creep to killer, McCarthy uses his stylistic remove and ambiguity to throw the narrative off kilter. Ballard places the corpse of his alleged second victim “in the bowels of the mountain” where there are “ledges or pallets of stone where dead people lay like saints.” People, plural. This one line left me reeling, and I questioned everything I had thought to be true about Child of God. How many bodies lay in that cave? For how long has Ballard been killing? When did Ballard become this evil? Has he always been so? McCarthy gives us no firm answers, and this ambiguity makes the preceding pages all the more frightening.
While Ballard never really meditates on his morality, the townsfolk gossip about him and the tragedies that befall their home at his hands, forming a chorus-like judgement. Some characters, especially the women in town, cower from Ballard; the men tend to treat him as stupid or cracked. Many seem to think Ballard has always been this way. Around the time Ballard is arrested on suspicion of rape, one townsperson remarks: “Suzie was sick yesterday. Suzie has always been sick. Suzie will always be sick. Suzie is a sick dog.” Suzie the dog is, of course, a stand-in for Ballard. It’s easy to see where they’re coming from. This perspective, however, unsettles me in the totality of its separation between good and evil. There is no chance the former could become the latter, no moral responsibility to rehabilitate those who do wrong, no failing in a lack of earlier intervention. It’s the easy way out. But McCarthy doesn’t seem to be an advocate for such categorical thinking—as his lack of pretense or judgement throughout the novel suggests. Instead, in Child of God, there is a kind of admittance: he doesn’t have the answers; neither do we, and I don’t believe the point of this novel is to find them but to ask the uncomfortable questions—to sit in the world as Ballard did, as he “watched the hordes of cold stars sprawled across the smokehole and wondered what they were made of, or himself.”
—Brighid Griffin, Assistant Editor