I noted that last month House of Anansi published Lisa Moore’s fourth novel (fifth if you include her young adult novel, Flannery). It’s titled This Is How We Love and I have every intention of reading it. However, I am embarrassed to report that I said the same thing in 2005 when I bought her first novel, Alligator, then lost it for 17 years. If you saw my book shelves, you would understand how such a thing is possible. And there’s her second novel, too, February, buried underneath another stack of books, and equally unread.
I’m worried people might mistake me for Jay Gatsby. There’s a funny scene in The Great Gatsby when Nick and Jordan enter Gatsby’s library and find a man sitting on a table, drunk and staring at all the books:
‘What do you think?’ he demanded impetuously.
‘About what?’
He waved his hand toward the book-shelves.
‘About that. As a matter of fact you needn’t bother to ascertain. I ascertained. They’re real.’
‘The books?’
He nodded.
‘Absolutely real—have pages and everything. I thought they’d be a nice durable cardboard. Matter of fact, they’re absolutely real…’
Like Jay Gatsby, all my books are absolutely real. And like Jay Gatsby, there is some likelihood that I haven’t read them. So, when I learned of a new novel from Lisa Moore, and when I thought I’d like to buy it, and when I remembered that I had other novels of hers, unread (although real) and gathering dust on a remote shelf, I was stricken by guilt. I’m not sure why. It’s not as if the reading police are going to come knocking at my door. And while I have no doubt Lisa Moore is concerned that her readers actually read her books, I don’t think she directs any of that concern specifically at me. She isn’t going to demand a sworn affidavit from me attesting to my reading commitments. Still, I paid good money for those books and I really ought to get my money’s worth. So, with that in mind, I sat myself down and read the two unread novels in my possession. As penance I have gone out and bought her third novel, Caught, and two short story collections. Then, when I’m all caught up, I’ll buy her latest.
First, let’s have a look at Alligator:
As improbable as it may seem, the novel, Alligator, actually features an alligator. I say improbable because the novel is set in St. John’s which is not known for its alligator population. Madeleine is a filmmaker who has in her archives footage of a man who owns a nature preserve in Louisiana where he breeds alligators. Each day, he entertains visitors with a show which culminates in a stunt where, à la Siegfried & Roy, he sticks his head in an alligator’s jaws. As we know from Siegfried & Roy, things inevitably go very wrong and Madeleine has the good fortune (good from a filmmaker’s perspective) to be there when they do. She has the camera rolling when the alligator clamps its jaws shut around Loyola’s head and gives the poor man a good thrashing. Years later, Madeleine’s 17 year old niece watches the clip, utterly spellbound, and learns that not only did the man survive but her aunt ended up having a relationship with him. There is one caveat: some of the alligator’s teeth punctured the man’s skull leading to infection and, ever since, he’s never been right in the head, so to speak.
Given the book’s title, its cover, and its somewhat gruesome opening, I think it’s fair to suppose the alligator is important in some way. And since it’s not important to the plot, I’m inclined to suppose that its importance rests in, say, symbolic heft. In evolutionary terms, alligators are ancient, primordial, purely animal, all instinct and no thought. It reminds me of the fable of the scorpion and the frog whose somber lesson seems to be that you cannot demand that someone behave in ways that lie beyond their nature. A corollary is that you shouldn’t be surprised when they behave in precisely the way those of their kind have always behaved. If you stick your head in the jaws of an alligator then you have to accept that sooner or later the alligator is gonna alligate.
An alligator lurks amongst the characters of Lisa Moore’s novel. A more clinical term might be sociopath. Like the fable of the scorpion and the frog, the sociopath in Alligator comes from Russia and his name is Valentin. His legal status on Canadian soil is unclear, but what is clear is that whatever his status, he is the one character who is unlikely to care. When he first comes ashore, we admire his resourcefulness and we admire his determination to repay a waitress who gives him a free meal. But we come to see that every action and every relationship he enters into is for a particular end, and that end is Valentin. He begins a campaign of harassment against Frank, a young man, orphaned, who has struggled to purchase a hot dog stand and license. Valentin demands that Frank hand over the hot dog stand and, until he does, Valentin will continue to shake him down.
Valentin isn’t the only one with hooks in Frank. There’s Colleen, too. Though her hooks are different. As an environmental activist, Colleen is probably the opposite of a sociopath. However, the outcomes of her behaviour make her indistinguishable from someone like Valentin. Or worse. At least Valentin will repay a waitress. Colleen seems more recalcitrant. She has gotten herself into trouble, pouring sugar into the gas tanks of heavy machinery used to clear cut the habitat of an endangered species. As a minor, she is eligible for a diversion program performing community service in lieu of a prison sentence. Colleen sees the program as a waste of time and walks away from it, having sex with the utterly smitten Frank, stealing his hot dog stand earnings before Valentin can get his hands on them, and making her way down to Louisiana where she hopes to meet her aunt’s old flame, the brain-addled Loyola on his nature preserve.
Clinically, Colleen may not be sociopath, but it remains an open question whether she is any less a scorpion than Valentin, at least to the extent that she has a certain fixity of purpose and a self-righteous attitude that makes her inflexible. We could ask that question of any other character in the novel. We could ask that question of virtually anybody we meet. We could ask it of ourselves. It’s unclear what Colleen hopes to accomplish by meeting Loyola. For his part, Loyola regards the girl as a nuisance. She’s confused and needs to get home to her family. The fact that she relents suggests that her only clinical problem is immaturity and that with a little growing up she’ll be fine.
While Colleen is visiting the alligator preserve in the American south, the real alligator pounces in St. John’s. Valentin has conspired with a susceptible actress to commit insurance fraud by burning down her house. He’ll then force her to surrender the proceeds of her policy. Frank is a tenant in the house and Valentin seals him inside when the place goes up in flames.
A technical observation:
The narrative is presented as a series of vignettes, each headed with a character’s name. Vignettes that feature Madeleine are headed “Madeleine”. Vignettes that feature Frank are headed “Frank”. And so on. Most of the vignettes appear in the third person. A handful of the “Colleen” vignettes (e.g. the first and the last) appear in the first person singular and this suggests that everything in the novel revolves around Colleen’s perspective. She is the wheel, and all the other characters are the spokes. However, Moore is inconsistent. A few of the Colleen vignettes appear in the third person and I don’t know why. I’d like to believe there’s a reason, but to me it looks like sloppiness.
A note of forgiveness:
Don’t give my technical observation much weight. Moore writes a beautiful sensuous prose which beguiles our nitpicking souls. For example, I found this passage utterly charming:
They hitchhiked to Madrid and fell asleep in a transport truck and the driver pulled over on a hill and got out to smoke under the stars and came back with a flowering branch of an almond tree cold with dew. She woke because the rain from the almond branch dropped on her cheek. She was disoriented and the flowers filled the cab with a green, sugary tang and the smell of cigarettes reminded her of her father, dead for years then.