CORONAVIRUS TIMES, continued. TPL branches have been back in service for a few weeks! To a limited extent but books are being taken out and returned. Between that and their ebooks (via Libby, Overdrive) I ended up with three heavyweight books all demanding my attention at the same time. Bonanza!
Kate Elizabeth Russell. My Dark Vanessa. USA: Harper Large Print, 2020.
Ever had a crush on your teacher? Well, I doubt yours was like Vanessa’s. In this amazing novel, author Russell explores every possible consequence of a student-teacher affair. Browick teacher Jacob Strane is forty-two; Vanessa Wye is fifteen; not quite Lolita but not quite legal. That was seventeen years ago and the affair went on for more than five years. Vanessa has been leading a lonely, self-destructive existence since then, but compelled to keep in touch with Strane who still teaches at the same school. Now a former student from that school is mounting a public campaign to have Strane fired for sexual abuse. She, Taylor, wants Vanessa to join her, because of those ‒ you know – school rumours from years ago. It’s time for Vanessa to examine her life, find some meaning for it. It’s #MeToo time.
Way back then, who made the first move? It was all so shy, tentative. Or was it orchestrated? Vanessa is infatuated, a willing partner, being adored by this man. He, of course, is well aware of the risk to his job and reputation. Yet each professes love as they grope each other behind classroom doors, sneak campus nights together, thinking no one notices. Until a third-party complaint turns into official interviews and looming disaster. Both Vanessa and Strane deny the affair, but Vanessa had unwisely divulged her love story to two people. Ultimately she agrees to protect Strane from criminal charges by “confessing” she lied, that she fantasized the whole affair. The school demands she make her “confession” in public to the students who supported the complaint. And she’s expelled from school, which she didn’t expect.
Nevertheless, Vanessa won’t let go; she starts the affair again, pathologically obsessed with him. They meet (always secretly), they argue over whose life was damaged, they have sex less and less frequently in which she seems oddly impassive. From Vanessa’s POV at the age of thirty-two, she begins to recognize her conflicting feelings, justifying him, then blaming him. Taylor’s request opens a new reality for her. Did Strane spot her vulnerability, create this dependency, or was he the catalyst that liberated a dark side already waiting? A man who tried to release her when she was no longer a seductive teenager. Now she has the power to ruin him. Russell’s dissection of a sexual abuse case is brilliant.
One-liners:
▪ Lurking deep within me, he said, was a dark romanticism, the same kind he saw within himself. (7)
▪ Driven toward it, toward him, I was the kind of girl that isn’t supposed to exist: one eager to hurl herself into the path of a pedophile. (165-6)
▪ Hands shaky, I start to type out, he used me then threw me away, then think better and delete it, the specter of firing and police and Strane thrown in prison still too frightening. (362)
Multi-liners:
▪ “We don’t even have to hold hands if you don’t want to, ok? It’s important that you never feel coerced. That’s the only way I’ll be able to live with myself.”
▪ “But the more time I spent with you, I started to think, my god, this girl is the same as me. Separate from others, craving dark things. Right? Aren’t you? Don’t you?”(209)
▪ “Loving you branded me a deviant,” he says. “Nothing else about me matters anymore. One transgression will define me for the rest of my life.” (458)
▪ “It’s just so typical, you know? That way he’d berate himself to make you feel sorry for him.” (468)
▪ He shouldn’t have to explain that even at thirty-two years old I’m still illicit, dangerous. I am living, breathing evidence of the worst thing he’s ever done. (161-2)
Strane:
“I feel so strongly toward you,” he says. “Sometimes I worry I’ll drop dead from it. It’s stronger than anything I’ve ever felt for any woman. It’s not even in the same universe of feeling.” He stops, looks at me. “Does it frighten you to hear a man like me talk this way about you?” (206)
Confessing?
“You lied,” Mrs. Giles repeats. “And why would you do that?”
I look her straight in the eye as I explain my reasons: because I was bored and lonely, because I had a crush on a teacher, because I have an overactive imagination. The longer I talk, the more confident I become, blaming myself, absolving Strane. It’s such a good excuse, it explains away anything I said to Jesse, plus whatever rumors the twenty-five other names on the list heard. This should have been my story from the beginning. (259)
Her shrink:
She starts talking in an authoritative voice I’ve never heard before, practically scolding. She says it’s humiliating what Browick forced me to do. That being instructed to demean yourself in front of your peers is enough to cause post-traumatic stress, regardless of anything else I went through.
“Being forced into helplessness by one other person is terrible,” she says, “but being humiliated in front of a crowd ... I don’t want to say that it’s worse, but it is different. It’s severely dehumanizing, especially for a child.”
When I start to correct her use of “child,” she amends herself: “For someone whose brain wasn’t fully developed.” (393)
Compulsion:
Into the phone I mumble, “I’m needy.” It’s the closest I can get to saying what I feel, which isn’t horniness, because it isn’t really about sex. It’s him looking at me, adoring me, telling me what I am and giving me what I need to get through the day-to-day drudgery of pretending I’m like everybody else. (402-3)
Stephen King. The Outsider. USA: Simon & Schuster, 2018.
We expect creepy from King, but he does such a great job laying the foundation that we willingly enter the lives of small-town Oklahoma residents, shocked and angry over the savage murder of a young boy in their midst. So cleverly beginning with police interviews, it takes time before we know just what happened. Detective Ralph Anderson is even more appalled when evidence clearly points to the town’s popular sports coach for youngsters. Yet coach Terry Maitland is the most horrified of all, claiming he was miles away when the brutal attack occurred. Picture the community outrage at this point. Total mayhem erupts when handcuffed Maitland is brought to the courthouse for arraignment. He is shot and dies on the sidewalk in front of the unruly crowd.
But it’s not over, of course. Not for Maitland’s devastated wife, target for the town’s vitriol. Not for the young boy’s grieving family which self-destructs. Not for Ralph who wants to wind up the case properly, needing to reconcile the conflicting evidence that Maitland was seen in quite different places at the same time. Enter Holly Dibney, an investigator in Ohio who makes the connection to a similar type of child killing in her area. Holly joins the growing Oklahoma team who want answers. Struggling to comprehend through brainstorming and careful collection of the facts, they sense that a new victim is being prepared and must be warned. King makes the supernatural become natural; prepare for a fraught, climactic confrontation. Credible? ... your call. But it’s grand entertainment from a master.
One-liners:
▪ “Those carrot-tops usually go bald very early in life, you know.” (13)
▪ Ralph Anderson was a man of two minds, and the double vision was driving him crazy. (175)
▪ Until the real killer of Frank Peterson was found—if he ever was―the people of Flint City were going to believe that Terry Maitland had gamed the system and gotten away with murder. (177)
▪ He slipped the noose around his neck and yanked it until the knot rested against the angle of his jaw, as the Wikipedia entry had specified (complete with helpful illustration). (205-6)
▪ “He said he’d leave your guts strewn in the desert for the buzzards.” (334)
▪ “I’m no genius, but I didn’t hit my head falling out of the dumb-tree, either.” (351)
Multi-liners:
▪ “My tongue runs like a supermarket conveyor belt on payday. Just ask anybody.” (47)
▪ She was standing there, and he would never forget the expression on her face. It was the look of some woman in a third world country, watching as her village burned. (27)
▪ Ralph’s thoughts were whirling around in his head like loose paper caught in a draft. He could not remember ever having been so completely blindsided. (88)
▪ Ralph thought she looked exhausted, and why not? She’d had a busy few days. In addition to that, being crazy had to wear a person out. (396)
▪ He had come here to avoid a terrible death from the sort of ravenous, skin-eating cancer that had taken his mother. Dying of a myocardial infarction while trying to do that would be a bitter joke. (450)
Collateral damage:
Yet as he sat here looking at Fred (or what remained of him), Ralph had to admit there was something devilish about the way the boy’s death had spread, taking not just one or two members of his nuclear family, but the whole shebang. Nor did the damage stop with the Petersons. No one could doubt that Marcy and her daughters would carry scars for the rest of their lives, perhaps even permanent disabilities.
Ralph could tell himself that similar collateral damage followed every atrocity—hadn’t he seen it time and again? Yes. He had. Yet this one seemed so personal, somehow. Almost as if these people had been targeted. (241)
Making connections:
“Let me ask you a question. Do you know if anything unusual happened at the Heisman Memory Unit on the day Terry Maitland visited his father for the last time?”
“Unusual like what?”
This time Holly didn’t lead her witness. “Like anything. You may not know, but then again you might. If Terry said something to his wife when he got back to their hotel, for instance. Anything?”
“No ... unless you mean Terry bumping into an orderly when he went out. The orderly fell down because the floor was wet, but it was just a chance thing. Neither of them was hurt, or anything.”
She clutched her phone so hard her knuckles creaked. “You never said anything like that before.”
“I didn’t think it was important.” (314-5)
Is Claude next?
“Isn’t he a convicted felon?” Holly asked.
“He is,” Ralph agreed, “but this is Texas. And he seems rehabilitated to me.”
“I think so too,” Yune said. “Seems like he’s turned his life around. I’ve seen it before when people get into AA or NA. When it works, it’s like a miracle. Still, this outsider couldn’t have picked a better face to hide behind, wouldn’t you say? Given his history of drug sales and service, not to mention a gang background with Satan’s Seven, who’d believe him if he said he was being framed for something?”
“No one believed Terry Maitland,” Ralph said heavily, “and he was immaculate.” (466)
Emily St. John Mandel, The Glass Hotel. Electronic edition (ebook) 2020, download from Toronto Public Library; originally published by Knopf, 2020.
What a strange, quite brilliant novel. A morality tale? A random universe of different “countries”? Vincent Smith is in a dead-end bartending job ‒ mind you, it’s in a spectacular luxury hotel on a remote British Columbia island – when she seizes an opportunity to become mistress to Jonathan Alkaitis and his immense investment company fortune. Yes, Vincent is a quirkily-named she. From the most humble family origins, she then moves easily through “the country of money” with all its perqs and a man she likes (but doesn’t love). Clients and friends drift in and out of focus in regular chronological shifts of scene. Then Alkaitis’ Ponzi scheme unravels, with the predictable, devastating consequences for all involved. Vincent disappears as fast and completely as Alkaitis wishes he himself had.
Vincent’s half-brother Paul inhabits the world of the addicted; we see much less of him. His modest success as an experimental musician is based on landscape videotapes he stole from his sister’s childhood bedroom. All her life Vincent compulsively captures five-minute scenes of nature on her video-camera. We next see her happily working on a container ship while Alkaitis fades in and out of a counterlife in prison. Brilliant it may be, but the jumps between scenes can be annoying, too.
A bit of a fail here; on saving page numbers for quotes, my tablet confused my desktop computer which went into a coma and I won’t try that method again.
A few bits
▪ No, money is a country and he had the keys to the kingdom. (160)
▪ “Was he depressed?” Alkaitis asks.
“Bro, it’s prison. Everyone’s depressed.” (153)
▪ “It’s all over the news,” she said. “He was a con man. The whole thing was a fraud.” (278)
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