A woman about to be married discovers that a parakeet has gotten into her hotel room, and the parakeet is her grandmother. The parakeet-grandmother is not all that excited about the impending wedding--she shits on the wedding dress--but neither is the Bride, to be honest, who moves through the various arrangements that lead to a wedding with disassociated trepidation. The parakeet-grandmother tasks her with finding her brother, warning her, however, You will not find him. In a sense this turns out to be true: her brother Tom has become a woman named Simone.
Parakeet is a novel about strange transformations. A grandmother becomes a parakeet; Tom becomes Simone. Of course, Simone is the person who Tom has always been, and as Simone she and the Bride may be able to have the kind of relationship they have never before had. Parakeet holds out the possibility of transformation as a discovering wholeness, a way of becoming oneself. But a wedding, too, is a kind of transformation, from a single woman into a wife, but perhaps not all transformations are welcome ones. In one brief chapter, the Bride finds herself transformed into her own mother. While unwelcome, occupying her mother's body allows the Bride to learn things she never knew about her mother: that she's consumed by lust, and also prone to uncomfortable bouts of farting. If this episode is an exercise in empathy, it's discarded by the end of the novel, when the Bride's mother viciously rejects Simone, who shows up to the wedding at last--becoming her own mother only gives the Bride permission, perhaps, to hate her more.
This is all a lot. Parakeet struck me as a novel that has a few too many good ideas, a few too many transformations. It has a kitchen-sink quality that crowds out the Bride's sense of listlessness and woundedness; it's overstuffed and gaudy. It takes patience, I think, to unravel the themes as they emerge: for example, we learn late in the book that the Bride associates her grandmother with parakeets because they, too, are immigrants from another climate to New York. (I'm very familiar with the monk parakeets who live in and around Green-Wood Cemetery in Brooklyn, but Bertino is taking some license when she describes them as having striking "indigo foreheads"--their foreheads are the same gray color as their breasts.) This observation unlocks, it seems, the connection between her grandmother and the traumatic attack the Bride keeps alluding to, when an anti-immigrant gunman stabbed her at a coffee shop where she was working after shooting to death two customers and her Asian-American coworker. There is an undercurrent of racial animus in her marriage--the grandmother-parakeet observes, disapprovingly, that her fiance is white--but otherwise this theme manifests mostly as a conspicuous attention to the Bride's brown skin that seems oddly bereft of any real cultural or ethnic implications.
The big theme, though, is trauma. The Bride has become a bride because she thinks it is the "normal" thing to do, and while she has craved normalcy in the aftermath of her stabbing, she has come in this last week to doubt whether such normalcy is really the solution to, or opposite of, that trauma. Though Parakeet is much more thoughtful and clever than Migrations, another book about trauma and birds, it struck me as presenting a similar ethos. Both books layer their traumas over one another, laying at the center, like the proverbial pea in the princess sheets', the Big Trauma. Layered over the stabbing, though not necessarily in a chronological way, are the Bride's distant mother and rocky childhood, her sister's absence, Simone's insistence on staging a play about her stabbing, Simone's own wedding, which ended in a heroin overdose, etc., etc. But for me, these layers fail to illuminate each other; they only make render them murky and illegible.
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