There was a period of time after the reluctant son was born when I could not watch much TV. Seeing someone die would tear me up. This wasn't just some actor pretending to die - nor was it some person irrelevant to the story who needed to die so that things could move along. This was someone's son or daughter who had died and they were not going to be able to recover from it. David Lindsay-Abaire, who wrote the play Rabbit Hole about a couple who lost their child, gets this. In talking about writing the play, he said that he remembers being a writing student at Juilliard and his teacher telling him to write about what terrified him. He remembers thinking, "I got nothing." Then he had a child. And he said, "Oh, so this is what she was talking about."
Don't read this book if you or your spouse have recently had a child. Or have adopted a child. Or if you are attached to a child. Especially a thirteen year old child who might, in some way, remind you of the hero of this book - the Young God, Nikki. This girl has grown up seven social rungs below white trash. In the opening scene, after Nikki has successfully made the jump, her mother goes off the wrong side of a 50 or 60 or who knows how many feet high waterfall leap into a river - which kills her - and Nikki flees the scene with her mother's boyfriend so that the police won't pick her up for being truant or return her to the group home she has run away from. The boyfriend takes her home and, because he "wants to stick his dick in her", has sex with her. And then she steals his car to go find her daddy who might be out of prison. Only to be disappointed by him when she finds him because he is no longer the biggest and best drug dealer in the county.
OK, I've probably given away too much of the plot - and my summary may be wrong because it hangs together and fills in details that are, at best, hinted at in the book. Instead of telling a story, Norris careens from describing one scene to the next. And, though I think she offers an homage to J.D. Salinger on about the third page when Nikki states the river is witch-tit freezing (Holden Caufield in Catcher in the Rye is the only other person I have heard in life or in literature state that it is as "cold as a witch's tit"); this is not a schizophrenic break of a privileged kid, nor is it the existential crisis of well read, intelligent, upper west side Franny Glass, nor is it wrapped in literary confection.
Norris is though, I think, reaching for literary greatness. Her style is more like Hemingway than Caufield, because it is brutal and spare, but I think she is trying to capture the psychology of her subject - to help the reader know what it is like to be Nikki, just as Salinger let us know what it is like to be Holden - though I think even more so Franny. She does this, as Salinger did, not by writing in the first person, but by writing in a style that reflects the functioning of the hero. In this case, the world is immediate -things are described simply and clearly - the visual images are bright, but there are smells and feelings - itchings - as well. Stuff is spatially oriented. Temporally, things jump from one moment to the next - especially as drugs enter the picture and a scene stops when consciousness does.
Nikki's character is as spare as the style of the writing. And how complex could she be? She has been trying to survive in a world that is not built to provide the care and attachment that builds a complex, Salinger-like character. Instead she is curious and driven - she wants to be on top - not to be a victim of circumstance. She wants to be a player, not the one played.
In this, Norris comes close to making the mistake that I think Stieg Larsson makes in his Girl with the Dragon Tattoo series. There, Steig, a man, characterizes trauma as an organizing rather than a disorganizing factor in the life of his heroine. As I read it, this is a male fantasy of being able to attack a woman - to harm her - without hurting her. Instead, she benefits - honing her anger into the ability to achieve revenge. And this myth apparently plays well with the women who, I assume, are the primary consumers of it. They like to identify with the heroine who is impervious to - or at least makes use of the slings and arrows of the powerful other and ultimately is able to bring him down.
Nikki is not unscathed (nor, to be fair, is the Girl with the Dragon Tattoo). And the quality of the damage is portrayed as much in the dissociative quality of the chapters - representative, I think, of the state of Nikki's mind - not in a description of her thoughts. What we know is that she is powerfully curious and ambitious. What might be missing is a sense of attachment - or a longing for that and using the cruelty of others as a masochistic substitute for the desired connection. And this creates the experience of the psychopath - the antisocial personality that is dispassionately disconnected from those around him or her - seeing others - using them - as a means to an end. She is also thirteen. How psychopathic and how in the moment is she? How self aware?
I was struck, in the middle of reading this book, at just how dependent Nikki is on a world that is completely foreign to her for her to get along. She needs not just the cars that she is stealing and learning to drive - and the guns which she learns to clean and load and fire (both the result of highly sophisticated engineering and manufacturing knowledge)- not just the ax that she uses in various ways and the lessons about how to dispose of a body so it won't be traced, she needs the highways and the trucks that carry the heroin that she will sell - the hotel owners who keep open the run down motel 7s that serve as brothels. She needs a world she neither cares about nor understands, but she doesn't sweat that (Of course, again, to be fair, we take these things for granted too, certainly all thirteen year olds do, but we who are out here are a bit curious about or knowledgeable of them. Nikki isn't). She takes what emerges. Learns what she needs to survive, and uses it to create a space where she can thrive. Or come as close to that as her circumstances will allow. And she gets that this is a very precarious world and she needs to be vigilant in it. How long will she make it? We don't know.
I have referred elsewhere with concern and puzzlement to Freud's weird position that to be truly happy - meaning most in line with our drives - doing what we were built to do - we should be having sex with all those we want to and killing those who get in our way. Nikki achieves this Freudian Nirvana state, but it looks a lot more like a Hobbesian nightmare - a life that is nasty, brutish and all too likely to be short. She seems to be hurtling through her life - not unlike the reluctant stepdaughter on her way to college - but the stakes, if anything, seem higher. Well, they are - there is mayhem in the stepdaughter's life but precious little murder. That said, Nikki's life will be little noted nor long remembered - despite her ambition. The reluctant stepdaughter lives in a very different social web than the one described here (OK, maybe I am somewhat defensively taking some distance).
The reluctant stepdaughter, even though she is reluctant to acknowledge her part in thinking about her experience, can do that. Nikki can't. The Oedipal themes that are played out in this book do not evoke reflection on her part - nor, at least in my case, on the readers. They do not evoke particular aversion for her - except that Nikki's father does not live up to her expectations. In fact, they don't seem to evoke much of anything - except acting them out. We become numb to the sexuality and the violence - at least I do - it is simply the next bit of action that occurs. And I think this is intended to convey the experience - and that is that this occurrence just is - it is experience unmediated by thought, guilt, or inhibition of any sort, the experience of Nikki. It is as close as we can get to what Freud thought was the natural state.
Don't read this book if you have just had a child. Do read this book if you want to get a sense of what it might be like to try to stay on top of the wave rather than to be swept under by it if you are a kid at the very bottom of the food-chain in the United States. Read it if you, like me, are curious about what this state of being might be like.
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