The Girl Who Trod on a Loaf by Kathryn Davis

Because, of course, anything can happen in a dream. A fierce old woman can be turned into a soft and trusting creature; she can be made to act in ways which betray her true nature. In the dream the dead can come back to life, and make you do things you'd never have done when they were still alive. They can make you let them touch you, make you open your body to them. They  can make you doubt your own true nature, leave you lying there on your bed sick with spent desire for something you never thought you wanted in the first place. How many times did Helle show up in my dreams, her skin like a sheet of water, thin and clear, an insufficient disguise for the glassy stalk of her will? Watery hands, watery mouth, turning suddenly, unexpectedly, to soft, pliant flesh.

When Helle Ten Brix, a Danish emigre to upstate New York, dies of a long illness, she leaves a great burden to her friend Francie Thorn in her will: The Girl Who Trod on a Loaf, an unfinished opera based on a Hans Christian Andersen folk tale. Helle's operas have always been rooted in the experiences of her own life: the early death of her mother, her cruel and cow-like stepmother, the unrequited loves foisted upon other women, who spurned her to become ordinary housewives, or worse, Nazi collaborators. It's these moments that make up the ur-text of operas like Det Omflakkende Mol, "The Erratically Flying Moth," whose moths are the same ones that flew out of Helle's stepmother's pantry, or The Harrowing of Lahloo, whose diva, pinned in place in the role of the figurehead of a great ship, perhaps mirrors the immobility of a woman's life in mid-century Europe. To finish The Girl Who Trod on a Loaf, Francie must go all the way back and recount the story of Helle's life, looking for the truths that might have emerged upon the blank staff of music.

The folktale at the heart of the opera goes something like this: a young woman, not wanting to spoil her new shows, lays a loaf of bread intended as a gift for her parents on the surface of a bog. Stepping on it, she's punished for her selfishness by being dragged to the bottom of the bog by the Bog Queen, who turns her into a statue. The loaf, perhaps, represents all those things that are not appropriately appreciated--perhaps a symbol of the love that Helle wastes on her girlhood crushes?--but really, it's the bog itself that matters most. It's a symbol for that hidden life, the depths hidden within a person, the dark place where love and pain reside alongside the capacity for creation. It's funny, this book reminded me so much of Robertson Davies' The Lyre of Orpheus, another book in which people come together to write an opera at the behest of a particular estate. Davies is all Jungian archetypes; his opera emerges almost deterministically by the sortition of mythological patterns. But it's Davis, I think, who understands the depth and turmoil of the real psyche, and the operas in The Girl Who Trod on a Loaf are infinitely more interesting. I was especially struck by the description of Fuglespil, the Nightingale, who enlarges himself over the course of the play by gruesomely stealing the eyes and parts of the other birds.

Yet, something made me feel as if I was skipping along the surface of the bog for much of the novel, rather than plumbing the depths. Kathryn Davis is, I think, one of the great living sentence writers, and The Girl Who Trod on a Loaf is certainly the best of her novels I've read since having my life changed by her debut novel Labrador several years ago. The language is, as you might guess, appropriately operatic, all sturm and drang, rich and stormy. But its richness prevented me, in some small way, from really understanding Helle in the way I think the book wanted me to. The book's ending--spoiler alert--struck me as so discordant that I felt that I must have totally missed something: Helle, having invited the whole town to a costume party, shoots Francie's married lover Sam three times in the heart. Well, I suppose I did notice that Helle had expressed a romantic interest in the much younger Francie, though I had never really imagined with the intensity of her schoolyard love for Inger. Perhaps that is part of Francie's, and the novel's surprise; perhaps we are gulled into not paying enough attention. Or maybe it was just me. Or maybe Helle's final act before she takes ill and dies is to do something truly operatic: a show-stopper.