WARNING: THERE MAY BE SPOILERS BELOW
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| “He has a way of watching her that makes her feel as if she is the most important thing in the world.”- My Absolute Darling, Gabriel Tallent |
Turtle Alveston is a survivor. At fourteen, she roams the woods along the northern California coast. The creeks, tide pools, and rocky islands are her haunts and her hiding grounds, and she is known to wander for miles. But while her physical world is expansive, her personal one is small and treacherous: Turtle has grown up isolated since the death of her mother, in the thrall of her tortured and charismatic father, Martin. Her social existence is confined to the middle school (where she fends off the interest of anyone, student or teacher, who might penetrate her shell) and to her life with her father.
Then Turtle meets Jacob, a high-school boy who tells jokes, lives in a big clean house, and looks at Turtle as if she is the sunrise. And for the first time, the larger world begins to come into focus: her life with Martin is neither safe nor sustainable. Motivated by her first experience with real friendship and a teenage crush, Turtle starts to imagine escape, using the very survival skills her father devoted himself to teaching her. The reader tracks Turtle's escalating acts of physical and emotional courage, and watches, heart in throat, as she struggles to become her own hero--and in the process, becomes ours as well.
Shot through with striking language in a fierce natural setting,My Absolute Darling is an urgently told, profoundly moving read that marks the debut of an extraordinary new writer.
So. Has Gabriel Tallent ever interacted with another human before in his life? I mean, forget about teenage girls- it’s fairly obvious that he’s never been one nor talked to one before ever (source: once having been a teenage girl)- but the rest of his characters are just as bad as Turtle.
In fact, you know the uncanny valley phenomena? That’s the feeling I got while reading. The characters are human, and the story is meant to be realistic, but there’s something lacking about it. One of the best examples of this is the way the two teenage boys speak. One speaks the way a shitty sitcom might have shown a teenage boy talking- complete with the 5 years out of date slang- and the other reads like a parody of a John Green hero. Perhaps Tallent was an isolated home schooled kid when he was young. Or maybe that’s how all Californians act and I’m the one who’s strange. I mean, I’m from the east coast, I’m probably the worst person in the world to ask about the way Californians act.
But that’s not the only “off” feeling I had about Tallent’s writing. Normally, with writers, even writers I don’t particularly care for, I feel something in their writing that tells me that this person loves what they do. I did not feel that at all with My Absolute Darling. In fact, I wonder what originally drew him to writing, though I can imagine him being the kind of person who was told his entire life that he was fantastic at writing to the point where, when he found himself without anything more to do, decided “what the hell, I’ll write a book.”
It’s funny, too, one of the questions that readers had for this novel on Goodreads is “Why does an adult white man think he can write about the sexual abuse and spiritual coming of her own about a teenage girl?” Now, normally I reject that idea because I believe that you should be allowed to be able to write whatever the hell you want, but in this case I can actually see her point. Why did Tallent think he could write from the point of view of a teenage girl with an unstable father when he doesn’t even understand how humans function let alone girls?
On the surface, this novel reminded me of History of Wolves, another 2017 lit fic release. I didn’t love that novel either, but it was able to connect with me a lot more than this one. It wasn’t particularly realistic either, but at least I understood where it was going and the points it was trying to make. And the main character was a better teenage girl than Turtle ever was.
In Tallent’s credit, he can turn a pretty phrase. The writing style was original and fit the mood that Tallent was trying to create. Though it could be a bit more rough- perhaps he should take lessons from some of the Scandinavian writers, who can do that dark, minimalist, rough around the edges style that would be perfect for this novel.
I can’t say that I actually liked My Absolute Darling all that much, nor can I say that I hated it outright. It was a good idea for a book, but I don’t think it got the best treatment. Perhaps it was too ambitious for a debut author to undertake and that’s why it ultimately failed, perhaps it should have been regulated to short story status. In fact, I think that’s what Tallent should have done, as with a full length novel, the many flaws in his writing can’t be hidden.
4 out of 10
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