This year alone there have been two complex and challenging memoirs - “The Incest Diary,” by an anonymous author, and “The Fact of a Body,” by the lawyer Alexandria Marzano-Lesnevich - that pushed the boundaries of writing about trauma.
MY ABSOLUTE DARLING MOVIE TRAILER FREE
Patty Jenkins, the director of the film, responded, in part: “If women have to always be hard, tough and troubled to be strong, and we aren’t free to be multidimensional … we haven’t come very far, have we?”īut when it comes to narratives about sexual abuse, we have come far. What we’re left with is an action hero, a kind of male fantasy figure out of “Mad Max: Fury Road.” And it’s a fantasy of a wearying sort, because Turtle has clearly been designed to be “empowering.” It’s a particular kind of condescension that recalls the director James Cameron’s recent remarks that the portrayal of Wonder Woman in this year’s blockbuster wasn’t gritty or tough enough, that it was insulting to women. But Tallent takes pains to tell us that “her mind cannot be taken by force.” You’d be forgiven for wondering, what mind? I don’t know what that would mean.” A case could be made that this is a consequence of abuse, that she’s vacated her body, split from her mind. She thinks, I don’t even know what all right would look like. A typical example: “She thinks, we have never been all right and we aren’t ever going to be all right. Turtle is almost devoid of interiority almost nothing she thinks or says is worth quoting. “She knows what happened, but why it happened and what it meant, she doesn’t know.” “Same, Turtle, same,” I wrote in the margins. “There is so much of her life she doesn’t understand,” Tallent writes of Turtle. Tallent is a confident enough writer to leave plot strands loose, but he leaves too much psychological terrain unmapped. There’s some pretension here, but also something larger: The idea of seeing the world accurately, treating it with care and referring to it with respect is central to the book. Nabokov didn’t refer to Lolita’s hips, but her “iliac crests” Tallent prefers “scapulae” to shoulder blades, “sclera” to the whites of the eyes. Nabokov’s ghost presides - as it always does, over stories of innocence defiled - not just in Martin’s arias of self-pity or desire, which recall Humbert Humbert, but in the vocabulary, in the satisfaction of naming the world with scientific precision. This is a book profoundly about other books, fed by the classics like tributaries. Her name is significant, too like Pip from “Great Expectations,” she has chosen it herself, and it harkens back to yet another character - Turtle, the tomboy detective from Ellen Raskin’s young-adult novel “The Westing Game.”
With her scabby knees and clear eyes, her native iconoclasm and funny nickname, she recalls the great child characters of American literature, all of them wayward and wounded: Scout from “To Kill a Mockingbird,” Bone from “Bastard Out of Carolina,” Frankie from “The Member of the Wedding,” Huck Finn. She lives on raw eggs, thistles, the rabbits and crabs she catches herself (how alluring she’ll be to critics of helicopter parenting). Turtle is a staunchly American type, perhaps the American type - tough, taciturn and almost pathologically self-sufficient. And if you’re conversant with “Law & Order: SVU,” you have a fair idea of where things are going to go (south) and why (Turtle comes of age, meets a boy, dad handles it about as well as you would imagine).Īlong with its horrors, “My Absolute Darling” is also a book of nostalgic pleasures. “Strip yourself of hesitation and doubt, train yourself to an absolute singularity of purpose.” By day, she wanders the woods barefoot while he drinks and reads Descartes. At 6, she gets marksmanship lessons at 14, she’s doing pull-ups while he holds a knife between her legs. The heroine, Turtle, a 14-year-old girl, grows up feral in the forests and hills of Northern California, raised by her father, Martin, a widowed survivalist. This story might also have been the germ of “My Absolute Darling,” Gabriel Tallent’s highly anticipated, accomplished and exasperating first novel about how imprisonment and isolation mark the mind. The animal had drawn the bars of its cage. The inspiration for “Lolita” came to Nabokov from a newspaper article announcing that, for the first time, scientists had coaxed a monkey into drawing a picture.
MY ABSOLUTE DARLING By Gabriel Tallent 417 pages.