A review of Blended by Clarion. Enjoy, and keep an open mind…
https://www.forewordreviews.com/reviews/blended/
Monthly Archives: October 2017
At last, hate, guilt, and repair
Back to that choice of subject. What’s in the subtext of that decision? I am a white male writer, an immigrant from the UK of nearly forty years—not exactly a refugee. Not even underprivileged relative to many US citizens, even. But I’m not setting my tale amid the black community of Flint, Michigan, or from within the Sioux Indian lands of North Dakota. Charlottesville? Well, that incident happened too late in my creative process. As for recent hurricanes, the shooting in Vegas, or the latest, wildfires? Well, I’ll touch on the Vegas thing, I guess, as it retroactively relates. Earthquakes? Earthquakes get a hearing in my story, because they lurk. We’re waiting on those. What’s all this got to do with Blended, a novel about a step-mom in a third marriage, juggling that third effort with half-hearted career choices, life in a blended family; an effort to help a refugee family blend into American society? Again, subtext.
It’s interesting to write about a female protagonist—only the second time I’ve done that in the decade I’ve been writing novels. Am I qualified? I wonder. So, I take care, I think. I protect Tillie Marsden from harsh judgment while trying to make her imperfect, and thus likeable—something I didn’t achieve with Daniel Pierce, my protagonist from Venus Looks Down On A Prairie Vole. Ironically, this task means introducing elements that are unlikeable, but not too unlikeable. Tillie’s a bit snotty about Jacob, her soft-bellied, mischief-minded step-son. She’s a modest social critic, insinuating comment about western consumerism, turning her nose up at mainstream branding, like Target stores, popular sport or vulgar music. She’s like a lot of middle-aged women, frankly, so maybe she’s relatable. I hope. Meanwhile, there’s evidence of her body-shaming attitudes, which seem adjunctive to overly healthy exercise and diet habits. There’s a back-story there, the reader may discover. The flip side of her sometimes muted, sometimes not muted criticism, is a deep-rooted guilt. On the whole, Tillie feels lucky and safe. She has arrived in middle age, in some ways dissatisfied and unfinished, yet clearly dealing with first world problems. Even her thwarted career path seems undramatic. Though she might have been passed over for privileged males, it’s not obvious that this happened, nor is it clear she’d bother to fight that problem if it reared itself again. Therefore, her volunteer job helping Bahram and Mira carries a melting pot of purpose: it is vaguely redemptive, but also an escape from home-grown troubles.
According to the laws of subtext, Bill Marsden, Tillie’s husband, would have even more to feel guilty about, and thus defend against. For him, this manifests firstly as protectiveness. He protects women from vulgarity (his testiness with Jacob’s offhand humor), and by denying women’s capacity for harm. Meanwhile, he exhibits a restrained skepticism about immigration, the trustworthiness of his blue-collar subordinates at work. As a middle-management figure within a construction company, he is a man in charge, ostensibly in a power-up position. But he’s not an obvious top-dog: a once-cuckolded husband, he betrays a fear of usurpers and infidels, across contexts. Regarding contractors who move on if work isn’t available (read the parallel, if sex isn’t available), he openly suspects, “their eyes wander.” The progressive view, attaching itself lately to object relations theory, would cast this as projection, a defense against guilty feelings that pervade the thoughts of presumed top-dogs. Therefore, he wanders/wonders: is he doing right by Jacob? Does he or did he neglect the needs of others, including his other two adult children, his cheating ex-wife? Subtext principle declares that each of these subordinate figures rebels against him, and now Bill Marsden—decent, hard-working, loyal and patriotic Bill Marsden—is taking it on the chin.
How much can people take? The tensions in the plot of Blended encircle eruptions that may or may not happen, so the reader waits for each figurative or literal event. An earthquake might happen, says neglected nature. Psychic tremors stir in the form of children’s acting out: the children of Tillie and Bill; the gaggle of nerves and play that Bahram and Mira seven-deep flock enact; the oblique, sometimes refreshing, sometimes merely annoying comments and toilet humor of Jacob. Children, the underprivileged: they provoke, and we ask them to apologize and thus repair. Adults in charge (including therapists) absorb the acting out of children; their unconscious defiance of power. Sometimes they apologize, repair. Each person’s task is to grow up, to take responsibility, protest against corrupt, self-serving leadership, or to yield authority with care.
We don’t yet know what happened in Vegas. For the moment, that incident suggests something we haven’t thought much about recently: indiscriminate hate. A man in a hotel holes up in his room with an arsenal of weapons, and during an outdoor concert that his room overlooks, he opens fire, spraying bullets and scattering people, killing and/or injuring hundreds. But he has no particular target, as far as we know. We’ve thought of hate, and we’ve certainly thought about discrimination, with respect to numerous such incidents in recent years. The culprits of violence are racists, or anti-western terrorists, we think. Amid progressive circles, at least, discriminatory hate has assumed a position of highest sin. As we gradually erode ‘judgments’ about sexual deviance, about substance use, for example, we’ve catapulted discrimination and hate to the top tier of social ills. And while selective hate has gripped our concern, the most pervasive form of hate—misanthropy—appears to have slipped past the hotel desk. I think of clients, even friends or colleagues, who sometimes jovially quip, “people suck”, or “people are disappointing”. I’m not suggesting that I or anyone else rebuke such expressions as if they necessarily portend atrocities, but consider this: what would be the reaction if the phrases were “black people suck”, or “whites are disappointing”.
Melanie Klein and others within the object relations school offered that hate and guilt live in the minds of infants, and are not easily extinguished. It’s not even clear that such a goal is realistic, or even desirable. Hate and guilt are innate capacities, not so much learned as inflamed by fateful development. By moving from what she termed the paranoid schizoid position to the depressive position, we experience our aggression, our love, our fear, and our power. We do damage. We have chances to repair. That’s life and humanity. In Blended, I have one character—a minor one—who embodies the civilized veneer that collapses and threatens to go postal. Then there are the characters who are more central to the plot. The people I want you, my would-be reader to care about. It is good to be an adult. I feel qualified to say that now that I’m grown and middle-aged. Yet I am a child. I will always be one.
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A subtext of what’s important
This subtext I reference: it’s nothing special. I mean that all stories have subtext, so it’s not as though authors do so much to inject it. Actually, the perception of subtext is more the job of the reader, in my opinion. These characters of Blended, who live in suburban Oregon in 2016, with the backdrop of an impending, contentious election, have elements to themselves that place them on different sides of social order. They’re parts of groups—some large and dominant, others small and vulnerable. I don’t have to spell it all out. As in therapy, you’d feel where everyone fits, because I think you’d relate.
Tillie Marsden is different from her mother, is closer to the spirit of her dad, who passed away when she was a teen. Mom is parochial, has barely ever left Tennessee, never mind looked beyond American borders with interest or concern. As Tillie volunteers through her local church to help a refugee Pakistani family assimilate into American life, she is re-igniting old, altruistic as well as internationalist leanings. Unlike her family, she is more in touch with her world citizen self. She’s a natural joiner, fits in seamlessly at church, at her non-profit workplace (though she dislikes its autocratic, national politics-mirroring new leadership). She is intuitively inclusive, open to new experiences and people. She is perhaps naïve.
Bill Marsden, her husband, is indulgent of Tillie’s volunteerism, but is skeptical. In between lines, a reader might detect his curmudgeonly scoffing. He’s decent and industrious, and in these ways, he embodies a familiar ethos in western society: he’s a provider, a father; a tacit advocate of neo-liberalist economics, which decree an individualist notion: anyone can make it in this world if they just roll up their sleeves and work hard. Therefore, anyone who isn’t making it is presumptively lazy or unmotivated, or else spending too much time whining. Jacob, his indolent twenty-something son, is therefore something of a challenge, not because he whines, but rather because he doesn’t work hard enough, or doesn’t seize his days properly. Bill is torn between competing needs: to commonly bond with his son versus lighting a fire under him.
Tillie is supportive of Bill’s parental stance, but becomes quietly sympathetic to Jacob’s idiosyncratic, indecisive nature, knowing it’s a function of his individuating path, which ought not be forced. Besides, she remembers a time when she was young and undecided over life’s direction, and was similarly wayward in her habits. Bill, meanwhile, is manifesting his own split internalizations. His late father was a Korean war veteran, and—I sort of hint—a roguish, perhaps womanizing husband (I don’t actually give evidence of this. Again, reader’s job?) Anyway, having not donned a military uniform himself, Bill is solely an economic warrior, and he protects women and children in the plainest and less dramatic ways, eschewing only emotional chores, to his detriment. His mother, still living, is a close-to-home figure—too close, actually. She hoards belongings, clings and irritates, and in so doing, exhibits her unconscious, chronic fear of loss. Thus, Blended is partly about people in relationship who are like one another, and otherwise how they live with differences.
Foreigners intrude, almost literally, and set up a few mirrors, but mostly provide contrast. That’s not the author’s POV, necessarily, but that’s the sense a reader should have if immersed in this fictional Bishop Grove world. My Pakistani refugee family cling together for survival and warmth, and seem ever-calibrating from lingering trauma and seeking fresh air to breathe. The father and husband, Bahram, seems most enamored of his new home and community, and he will look for Tillie’s help in ways that will test her limits. She must figure out a way to help him, to help Mira, his wife, and to help them all while protecting them from common, middle-American projections: that these poor, refugee immigrants are helpless, reliant upon charity; soaking up public resources or Tillie’s time away from her real family.
For many, family is not just the most important unit of society, it is an accomplice to that neo-liberal economic and individualist myth, and this generates considerable stress in some. I have clients, for example, who lament that they don’t have enough time to occupy themselves with social causes, community outreach, and they usually cite the dual priorities of work and family as the reason. I have Tillie belong to a church so as to compliment religious institutions for providing a compromise, for church programs manage to do both, I think: they confront social problems, organize events around community causes while engaging families in a process that brings them together at the same time. This traditional pastime isn’t uniting Tillie, Bill, and Jacob, but that’s only because Bill and Jacob are not religious, which isn’t the fault of the church.
I didn’t have to place action away from American shores to spark this contemplation of outsiders and insiders, similarity and difference, and in an important way I haven’t. I might have fashioned a drama that was closer to home but still compelling notice of diversity and disadvantage: an event based upon the water crisis that has befallen Flint, Michigan, for example, or the Standing Rock controversy, regarding a pipeline project that threatens to impinge upon Sioux Indian lands. Progressives, who can also be parochial, might complain that home-grown oppression is more important for artists and writers to address. As an immigrant and now American (and world) citizen, I lean towards depicting the less fortunate visitor, the truly outside and exiled individual—the refugee—and emphasizing not so much the political triggers of their escape but rather moments of assimilation blended with needs we all have in common. Water is, of course, a need everyone has in common. Oil? I’ll leave that as a question mark.
However, the focus of Blended is upon emotional needs that Americans, foreigners, people from Tennessee, all presumptively have in common: love, attachment, and—paradoxically—separation, and freedom. Hard work. Hard writing. If I keep going like this, I should make it, you might think. I might make it. But for now, I am almost done orienting the reader to what’s important about my novel without giving everything away. I want the reader to do some work, after all. Will you?
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Graeme Daniels Psychewriter 