My Absolute Darling by Gabriel Tallent
This is a book I expect to be thinking about for a long time. I’m rating it highly mostly because of its uniqueness, both in content and writing style. It has some flaws, but the strength of its main character and the lush descriptions made up for it. You can practically smell the redwoods. Every page is steeped in the flora and fauna of Northern California, not just in the landscape but also in the character of the people who inhabit it.
Julia, aka “Turtle” lives with her father Martin in a falling-down house near Mendicino, California. It’s never explained why she goes by Turtle, but it’s probably because she has a hard shell. Her father calls her “Kibble” which sounds cute until you realize it pretty much means “the dog’s breakfast” which is deep down how he treats her. The landscape is a huge part of this novel. Even when the characters are indoors, they’re still interacting with the outdoors, whether by letting raccoons and weasels clean off their pan, or looking at the mushrooms growing on the windowsill when they’re in the bathtub. Turtle wanders around the property, spending a lot of time out in the woods or down at the beach. Mostly she seems to spend time shooting things and cleaning her gun.
Guns are a huge thing for Turtle and Martin, something they share. The first scene has Martin holding up a playing card for Turtle to shoot out of his hands. Turtle’s mom is dead (we’re never told exactly how) and this is how he sees fit to raise her. He taught her to shoot, to be tough. He’s beat her into strict, unwavering obedience, and he also has sex with her on the regular. So, not the dad of the year. But Turtle is tough and resilient and she has no problem living outdoors when she needs to.
Turtle has a relationship with her grandfather. She visits him and they play cribbage and talk. Her grandfather drinks a lot, and the story Martin tells is that the grandfather is a horrible, sadistic abuser of a man. To Turtle, he’s kind, but you can also see the mark of his old cruelty in Martin, like a dry arroyo that once had seasonal floods. I think that Martin and his father are two of the best-crafted relationships in the book.
The third relationship Turtle has is with two boys, Jacob and Brett, whom she finds lost in the woods. Jacob and Brett felt extremely unrealistic to me, mostly because of their dialogue. They talk the way literature grad students imagine an idealized version of themselves would talk, given limitless time and revision. When Brett is squirting easy cheese into his mouth and calling it “dank,” I could believe he was a real teen. When Jacob says “And was your Zen master the ancient, slow-moving reptile on whose shell rests the entire universe, known and unknown, fathomed and un-fathomed?” I had a hard time picturing him as a real person. By her actions, we are meant to believe that Turtle falls in love with Jacob, but he’s an idealized version of a boy.
Martin is the kind of guy who believes that because he’s a man, he is just simply better. He’s not just any man, he’s a big man who is not afraid of violence, and he demands obedience because he can’t conceive of being wrong and because he’s willing to use violence to uphold his authority. He’s insanely jealous of Turtle, and destroys gifts given her just because he can’t stand anyone else making her happy. He’s really a loathsome creature. He tells Turtle over and over again how much he loves her, how she is his absolute darling, but he also beats her when she disagrees with him and then gets angry that she emotionally retreats. On many occasions he talks about how he almost did or will someday kill her.
Most of Turtle’s thoughts are introspective, and you can see how Martin’s verbal abuse has poisoned her even when you can’t see the abuse itself. Her inner voice has a potty mouth, and it uses some horrifically sexist slurs against herself and any other female. Anna, a teacher from school, figures out that Turtle is being abused in part because Turtle has absorbed her father’s misogyny. Anna tries to intervene, but you can see from Turtle’s point of view that any attempt to pry Turtle from Martin is bound to be futile. Anna would just be killed (or cause Martin to kill Turtle) if she tried. Martin has said as much, that if anyone suspects what’s really going on in that house, he’ll slit Turtle’s throat. Martin sees Turtle as his prize possession, he has a lot of guns, and he fantasizes about going out in a blaze of glory.
An event happens that changes the dynamic of Turtle and Martin’s relationship. I’ll be coy about details because I don’t want to ruin the book. Martin leaves for a while, and after he comes back, there’s a new person whom Turtle feels she ought to care for. It’s the introduction of a third person to their unhealthy symbiosis that disrupts the status quo and makes Turtle finally take action. Some of the scenes with this new person are grotesque and visceral and had me cringing.
Sadly, gun violence remains blisteringly topical. As I write this, it’s the day after a gunman shot a bunch of people in California. I doubt you could use this novel for a successful argument for gun control though. Gun control advocates would see it as a reason to keep guns out of the hands of crazy people like Martin. Those who oppose restrictions would imagine themselves in the hero’s role, and claim that gun control would have disarmed the good guys. But at least this book doesn’t sugarcoat the aftermath of gun violence.
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