Aren't you tired of post-apocalyptic stuff? The endless exposition... the world-building... the grimdarkness of it all? What if there were a post-apocalyptic novel with no world-building or exposition at all? What if instead it were about one weird incestuous family living in an abandoned hospital watching television shows where Thomas Aquinas solves personal problems? How does that sound?
The family of The Doloriad consists of the Matriarch and the Uncle (who turns out really to be her husband, I think--it wasn't quite clear to me), both of whom remember the world before the unnamed cataclysm, and two generations of children who have never known anything but isolation. The youngest generation are the children of the siblings of the older generation, because here there's no one outside the family--no one, that is, outside a legless old schoolmaster tasked with teaching the children... well... something. Among the children are Jan, the vicious farmer who is the family's true functioning leader, Agathe, who is sharp, suspicious, and observant, and Dolores, who is described as fat, stupid, and mute. When the book opens, Dolores is being carted in a wheelbarrow in an offering of marriage to a mysterious group of others who are suspected to reside beyond the family compound, in the forest. When Dolores makes her way back, it presents a bad omen and destabilizes a fragile status quo.
The Doloriad is, among other things, really upsetting. It is filled with incest and rape, and doesn't shy away from describing them. There is none of the sense here that some "post-apocalyptic" fiction has, that a new civilization might rise hopefully from the ashes. Whatever has happened to the world has left the Matriarch's family in a much vitiated state, morally and physically degraded. But it's filled, too, with strange and funny details that make the story unusual, like those tapings of the show Get Aquinas in Here! Like, what the hell is that? Are they watching tapes, or is there still somehow television? Or is it perhaps that there is some slippage between the degraded physical world and the mental world that allows these shows to appear on the television set? A character is murdered by being stabbed through with a metal pole, in a grisly reminder of a previously seen episode of Get Aquinas in Here where a cheerleader comes to her school counselor with the same affliction. Was the murder inspired by the episode, or was the episode somehow a foreshadowing of the murder? Williams suggests that Dolores, mute and insensate, might actually hold a kind of psychic power that has something to do with the TV show. Or at least that she is deeper and more knowing than she appears.
I could be misreading; The Doloriad is not an easy or simple read. But what actually impressed me the most is that so much of the book shouldn't work, but does; Missouri Williams is somehow able to make the impossible work. See, for example, the huge mound of motheaten cloth that the schoolmaster has made, thinking, somehow for some reason, that it will act like a cocoon that will give him the ability to reborn. Whatever--sure! It's hard to think of a book that's as viscerally unpleasant to read, but which is so impressive. I don't think it will make my year-end list--it's too aloof, too prickly and queasy, too difficult to penetrate--but I give it my highest praise, which is that I've really never read anything like it.
