Creatures ambiguous, mutable, and transitory
Dear Tara,
You asked in a recent letter whether this novel is really about Vera or Miss MacIntosh? Well, based on Chapter 25 and the dozen or so that follow, there’s an argument to be made that the book is very much about yet another character-- the avuncular Mr. Spitzer!
After the shocking revelation that Miss MacIntosh is not who she pretends to be, but rather a “bald pretender,” Vera asks herself to whom she should turn for “any contrast to these wild illusions and selfish or selfless deceptions.” Might Mr. Spitzer be the answer? It doesn’t take long to recognize that he is not:
1. He was “a sad man in the wrong world, and his mind was watery and vague.”
2. He spent his time on “obscure errands in search of lost deeds and lost heirs and bastard sons and unnatural mothers and lost heirlooms…”
3. Everyone confused him for his dead brother Peron to such a degree he often believed he was Peron.
4. He “was always busy losing weight, even as he gained it” (?!)
5. He had “suffered this great wound of death, and yet he suffered more, this wound of life.”
You get the picture--not an exemplary role model for a teenage girl!
What’s wonderful about these pages, apart from the always magnificent writing, is the metaphor that Young offers for Mr. Spitzer’s existence, one in which life and death wounds coexist: his expansive butterfly collection that contains creatures ambiguous, mutable, and transitory. To paraphrase Young, creatures that had seen themselves die, while yet they lived. A statement as true for Mr. Spitzer as it is for Vera’s mother. And perhaps Miss MacIntosh, too.
Vera is rebelling against the adults in her life, fighting her own fall into this type of ambiguous, mutable, and transitory existence. But she needs to find an Ariadne to lead her out of the labyrinth, away from the dangerous Minotaur, a monster of illusion and deception.
The question that intrigues me at this point in the novel is whether Vera has already escaped the labyrinth when we meet her on the bus in the opening pages, or is she still running from the fearsome Minotaur, close at her heels? Young’s decision to situate the vast bulk of her novel in memory, in Vera’s past rather than chronologically, makes this mystery primary to our experience with the book. Is that endless bus ride in Indiana indicative of the continuation of Vera’s long flight from illusion? Or does it signify something else instead: a seamless circle in which life and death, past and present, dream and reality, all exist simultaneously and without differentiation?
In search of lost heirlooms,
Lori