There
used to be something called the 'nuclear family': a mom, a dad, and the
legendary 2.4 children. In Britain, such familial constructs were on the
wane even before the dismantling of the Berlin Wall. Ellen, however,
still has such a family, even down to the stay at home mom. Yet the novel
begins with Ellen returning home from her Grand Tramp around Europe. Deep
down she must know something is wrong since she has stayed away from her family
for several years.
The prose of
this intro is the stuff of which classics are made. You are enthralled as
Ellen steals into her home, as she describes the pacified denizens of Philmont,
and as she encounters the Goldilocks in her bed. Lemaitre has a real ear
for familial conversation and drama. It could be you eavesdropping on
your parents' less than enthusiastic response to your surprise visit home from college,
their annoyance at your showing up after months of being incommunicado.
Ellen is a spoilt rich college girl, and she knows it. Part of the reason
for her less than successful trip around Europe was to avoid the adult world of
work, and that's something that I can certainly identify with. Thrown
into this mixture is the lowly outsider Ellen, poor white redneck superstitious
trash in comparison with the rich and irreligious Kaplans. However, Ellen
has been away so long that she is also the outsider. She's able to see
the changes which April's presence has wrought far more clearly for having been
away, for it she who can see the junk diet food stashed away in the larder.
Ellen feels
that her place has been usurped by April, that April is the enemy in a
Cold War in which there can be only one victor. April's influence seems
to have turned everything upside down. She seems to have influenced
James, Ellen's beloved brother, into leaving Berkeley. Even worse, April
laughs at Ellen's father's dated jokes. She seems to get on the best side
of everyone. Ellen is not used to being the victim, the one forced to sit
on the broken chair in the kitchen because all the others are taken. She
has a perverse desire to be both at the centre of attention and away from it,
especially in regards to her relationship with her mother. Ever since
Ellen has returned, her mother has fussed far more around April than
her. To make things even worse, her father has decided to be far more
difficult in the usual money bartering - Ellen has to actually do something
about getting a job before she can get the cash. But the worst offense
seems to be the fact that April has gotten in the way of Ellen's unusually
incestuous relationship with her brother James. This disturbing
brother/sister relationship is one of the first things which sets the alarm
bells a-ringing. Ellen also seems to have quite a disturbing passion for
the alluring Frederick, a masochist of Germanic origins in contrast to Ellen's
Jewishness. She seems greatly attracted to this man who offered to pay
James for her maidenhood when she was still only a child.
Unwittingly
perhaps, April decides that to confide in Ellen that she is with child.
To make matters worse, she has persuaded James to take a job, and he chooses
the vocation of garbage man, an insult to his privileged life and
education. So, Ellen decides to set up James with gorgeous man-eater
Courtney. The only trouble is that April keeps doing nice things for
Ellen. As Ellen sets her trap in motion, she begins to feel more for her
adversary. Wouldn't having Courtney as a sister-in-law be far worse?
The setting of
the novel is quite evocative. Philmont is fairly close to Philadelphia,
much improved, as Ellen's mother notes, by the removal of the Rocky statue (by
a bizarre coincidence, the BBC decided to run the Rocky films as I was reading
this novel). However, the town is under threat by the ominously named
LandLevel Inc., and this is the story which Ellen has been sent to cover by the
local newspaper, The Philmont Organ. The motto of this journal is a great
example of Lemaitre's humour: 'Think of the
Organ
as
your
Organ'.
Along with all the wit however, is a healthy dose of blackness, almost Waughian
in depth, especially the way that James behaves later in the novel. Yet
there are also scenes of quite tortured, surreal fantasy, like the episode in
the library. This is where Lemaitre has gotten her reputation for being
'strange' from, and I must admit that I don't quite think that it works.
Just as James
is into Plato, so I think that Lemaitre is into Euripides. There's a
great scene in Murakami's 'Norwegian Wood' where Toru explains Euripides'
methods to Midori's bedridden father: "it's basically impossible for
everybody's justice to prevail or everybody's happiness to triumph, so chaos
takes over. And then what do you think happens? Simple - a god
appears at the end and starts directing the traffic". This seems to
very much the pattern that Lemaitre follows in her resolution of 'April's
Rising'. There is a deus ex machina, with the machina part being Ellen's
kid brother's computer, and as Toru notes, such conclusions can be
unsatisfying, too easy. Ellen certainly smells more of roses than she
should. Or it could be that this novel is the first to depict the Chaos
Family. One of my favourite characters is Zero, Courtney's brother, who
suddenly starts spouting chaos theory in a diner, a seemingly off the wall
interjection. Yet the more Ellen tries to control events, the more
entropy spreads, leading to a quite unwholesome
disaster. There's quite a bit of the ying and the yang in
this observation by Ellen: "Now I know why we can hear each other's
thoughts. We're two halves of the same person. Creator.
And destroyer." You just can't predict what's going to happen
at the quantum level. Such is the folly of those who would play God like
Ellen.
AuthorTrek
Rating: 7/10
Kevin
Patrick Mahoney
