My Absolute Darling by Gabriel Tallent

The truth is that things do not work out, that there are no solutions, and you can go a year, a whole year, and be no better, no more healed, maybe even worse, be so skittish that if you’re walking down the street with Anna, and if someone opens a car door and gets out and slams the door you turn around, honest-to-god ready to kill them, turn around so fast that Anna, who knows what is happening, cannot even open her mouth in time and then you’re standing there, crying, and there’s some guy in a leather jacket and a fedora getting out of his Volkswagen Rabbit staring at you like, is this girl all right? and you want to be like, this girl is not all right, this girl will never be all right.

I picked up this novel after my sister recommended the movie; I watched the preview, inferred that the book was about a father and his daughter living off the grid, challenging the status quo, etc. I could not have been more mistaken. Tallent's novel is the most brutally violent book I have ever read. It is a story of abuse more than anything else, and nothing prepared me for the gore and specificity of the violence Tallent lays out. Turtle (or Julia), the heroine, is interesting enough that you want to keep reading to see whether she emerges on the other end, but I had to repeatedly put the book down because the prose was so graphic.

The writing itself was bizarrely uneven. In some places, Tallent's descriptions are lyrical and beautiful. This was especially true when he was describing Turtle as she moved through the lush forest surrounding her home:

She holds her breath and sinks to the bottom and, drawing he knees to her shoulders with her hair rising around her like weeds, she opens her eyes to the water and looks up and sees writ huge across the rain-dappled surface the basking shapes of newts with their fingers splayed and their golden-red bellies exposed to her, their tails churning lazily. 

Moments like this are scattered throughout, a welcome relief to the graphic violence. But then he does things like using the phrase "gathering rain" three times on the same page; sometimes his prose was so stilted that it took me out of the story entirely.  Turtle (and, I can only assume, the author) has an almost encyclopedic knowledge of firearms, and the sections detailing the maintenance, care, and use of guns read almost like instruction manuals which I also found distracting. The many, many moments of violence are so incredibly sharp and precise that they feel almost pornographic in their specificity. Overall, the writing felt choppy and disconnected and the brutality of the text made it almost unreadable.

Overall this was just too much for me. It wasn't paritcularly redemptive, it wasn't beautiful or interesting enough to make the violence worth enduring. Maybe that's the point? Sound and fury signifying nothing, etc, etc, but Tallent tries for a resolution that he doesn't quite land which muddles the whole thing.