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sophia_sol) wrote2012-07-21 10:20 pm
sophia_sol) wrote2012-07-21 10:20 pm
Shelter, by Susan Palwick
Susan Palwick is an author who has loomed large in my thoughts for years, ever since my local library got a copy of her second book, The Necessary Beggar, when it came out seven years ago. Intrigued by the title, I checked it out, and promptly read the whole thing in one sitting. I spent probably the entire second half of the book in tears, large parts of it in uncontrollable sobs, but the ending was a thing of incandescence, making all of that sobbing worth it. The book was intensely, amazingly powerful, and it spoke to me to a degree that few books do.
I've always been kind of afraid to reread The Necessary Beggar since then, afraid that it isn't as amazing as I remember it, that it will be disappointing, and I will no longer be able to hold onto the intensity of that first reading. So my memories of what the book is even about are kind of shaky; all I remember is how I felt.
But that book means that I've always kept an eye out for Susan Palwick. She's not a particularly prolific author, with three novels and one short story collection in the twenty years she's been published. Her short story collection is pretty mindblowing, as I recall, though it's been years since I've read it, and that one I DO want to reread. Her first book is nongenre and I only just recently found out it exists; I want to read it.
Shelter is the most recent of her books, though it's already a number of years old, and I'm not sure why it took me this long to read it. Maybe I was afraid that it too wouldn't live up to The Necessary Beggar.
And, well, it's not fair to compare ANY book to the shaky shades of remembrance of a book from a girl who was in the full throes of teenage emotionality at the time of reading. When I read The Necessary Beggar I was not as critical a reader as I am today; back then I either LOVED a book or I didn't, and there was little middle ground, and I did not yet know how to acknowledge that something I love has flaws without those flaws requiring me to lessen my love. So the version of The Necessary Beggar that lives in my head is a perfect book, and thus incomparable.
Shelter is a flawed book, but that doesn't mean it isn't powerful and amazing. And it's flawed, in part, because it is so very ambitious, and though it fails in places it's still very worth reading.
It feels very unfair of me, then, to realize that most of what I want to talk about IS its flaws.
It took me a long time to read Shelter; I got bogged down partway through, and the only reason I made myself pick it back up (weeks later) is that I COULDN'T let it go without finishing, because it was SUSAN PALWICK.
The book is largely about (and from the point of view of) two women, Roberta and Meredith. But the opening of the book feels confusing and you don't have any emotional tether holding it to you to make you care about what's going on. It's structured somewhat oddly -- it opens in the "now" of the book, in the middle of a storm, when Roberta and Meredith meet each other again for the first time in years, and then most of the rest of the book consists of them telling each other their stories, explaining where they were coming from and why they did what they did in the past. I don't really like the structural choice. I can see why it was made, but it's...frustrating, and not just because of Meredith.
Meredith goes first, and goes on for the longest, and frankly I don't like Meredith. But then we're not supposed to, I think -- Meredith and Roberta are set up in large part as opposites, and Meredith is so very selfish and self-centred that it's really very hard to like her, even while understanding the difficulties her life has had.
The thing is, I think, that the central conflict and tension and emotional connecting-place of the book -- Meredith's adopted son Nicholas -- isn't introduced till the book is halfway over, and the book is VERY LONG. But on the other hand I don't know of any way the book would work WITHOUT all that very long lead-up. The lead-up is important and necessary to understanding why the various characters react as they do to Nicholas, and what exactly the ramifications of agreeing to get help for him would be. The world needs to be set up as this complicated place where there's this possibility of hope for Nicholas, but a hope that is in many ways quite awful, and Meredith needs to be set up as the sort of person she is, too, and -- oh, all sorts of things.
You couldn't open with Nicholas' nightmares about the monsters and his reactions to them, because without context, there isn't the same kind of tension.
And yet Nicholas is the heart of the whole thing, and until he arrived on the scene I was ultimately frustrated with the book and ready to give up on it. After Nicholas was introduced, I read nonstop and stayed up late to finish.
The ending is the other thing I had a problem with. It felt too facile, to quick, and kind of out of nowhere. The ending tries to establish Meredith and Roberta as finding family in each other -- family is a theme throughout the whole book, and the theme is largely very well-done.
Roberta's feelings of belonging with her girlfriend's (and then ex-girlfriend's) family, and how hard it is for her to break up with her girlfriend simply because she doesn't want to lose her family -- that's wonderful. And the relationship both girls have with Preston, and what they think of each other because of him. And the difficult relationship Meredith has with Constance and Jack, and Meredith's inability to trust her husband, and the way she gets so entirely tied up around her son to the exclusivity of everything else. Yeah. All that's really good. There's so much pain and difficulty tied up in families throughout the book, but still a longing for and a need for family.
But because of all that pain and difficulty, the reconciliation at the end just doesn't feel right, because it doesn't feel earned. It feels very much out of nowhere, and -- well, maybe it's just that the ending moved too fast. If there had been extra time spent on the development of this found family at the end, if it had been shown instead of told, it would have been much better. Because that sort of ending IS the right one for the story, but as it was it didn't quite work.
My final problem isn't actually a problem with the book itself, but a problem with my library, which inexplicably filed Shelter in the fantasy section when it is clearly scifi. And this meant that I read the book with the wrong genre protocols hanging out in the back of my mind, so when Nicholas started having those nightmares of monsters, monsters that needed to be appeased and fed, I found his reactions entirely rational, and even right. His discussions with Berta and Fred on the various options on how to deal with hypothetical monsters put me entirely in sympathy with him.
I was reacting as if there was a possibility that the monsters were real.
In a fantasy book that's a totally reasonable conclusion to draw, that Nicholas is doing the right thing! But of course this ISN'T fantasy, and Nicholas' monsters are the result of mental illness. Until the full story of what happened that night with the dead mice at school, though, I had trouble getting myself to believe that that was the case, that Meredith (and Roberta, and Fred) had genuine reason to be worried about him.
Anyways. Those are all the problems I had with the book. It's harder to talk about the things it does WELL, because there is SO MUCH it does well (particularly the full and nuanced characterizations of the people within it, and not just the main characters; and also the worldbuilding.)
(one of my favourite parts of the book was possibly Zephyr. She is just such an interesting person, one whom I would probably get very fed up with if I knew her, but who, through the intermediary of the book, I very much do like.)
But the book is really good, and reconfirms my opinion that Susan Palwick is an author to look out for. And I definitely recommend you read this, or another of her works, because she should be better known and more widely praised than she is.
OKAY IS THAT ENOUGH WORDS ABOUT SUSAN PALWICK YET?
(IF NOT I COULD PROBABLY FIND MORE)
I've always been kind of afraid to reread The Necessary Beggar since then, afraid that it isn't as amazing as I remember it, that it will be disappointing, and I will no longer be able to hold onto the intensity of that first reading. So my memories of what the book is even about are kind of shaky; all I remember is how I felt.
But that book means that I've always kept an eye out for Susan Palwick. She's not a particularly prolific author, with three novels and one short story collection in the twenty years she's been published. Her short story collection is pretty mindblowing, as I recall, though it's been years since I've read it, and that one I DO want to reread. Her first book is nongenre and I only just recently found out it exists; I want to read it.
Shelter is the most recent of her books, though it's already a number of years old, and I'm not sure why it took me this long to read it. Maybe I was afraid that it too wouldn't live up to The Necessary Beggar.
And, well, it's not fair to compare ANY book to the shaky shades of remembrance of a book from a girl who was in the full throes of teenage emotionality at the time of reading. When I read The Necessary Beggar I was not as critical a reader as I am today; back then I either LOVED a book or I didn't, and there was little middle ground, and I did not yet know how to acknowledge that something I love has flaws without those flaws requiring me to lessen my love. So the version of The Necessary Beggar that lives in my head is a perfect book, and thus incomparable.
Shelter is a flawed book, but that doesn't mean it isn't powerful and amazing. And it's flawed, in part, because it is so very ambitious, and though it fails in places it's still very worth reading.
It feels very unfair of me, then, to realize that most of what I want to talk about IS its flaws.
It took me a long time to read Shelter; I got bogged down partway through, and the only reason I made myself pick it back up (weeks later) is that I COULDN'T let it go without finishing, because it was SUSAN PALWICK.
The book is largely about (and from the point of view of) two women, Roberta and Meredith. But the opening of the book feels confusing and you don't have any emotional tether holding it to you to make you care about what's going on. It's structured somewhat oddly -- it opens in the "now" of the book, in the middle of a storm, when Roberta and Meredith meet each other again for the first time in years, and then most of the rest of the book consists of them telling each other their stories, explaining where they were coming from and why they did what they did in the past. I don't really like the structural choice. I can see why it was made, but it's...frustrating, and not just because of Meredith.
Meredith goes first, and goes on for the longest, and frankly I don't like Meredith. But then we're not supposed to, I think -- Meredith and Roberta are set up in large part as opposites, and Meredith is so very selfish and self-centred that it's really very hard to like her, even while understanding the difficulties her life has had.
The thing is, I think, that the central conflict and tension and emotional connecting-place of the book -- Meredith's adopted son Nicholas -- isn't introduced till the book is halfway over, and the book is VERY LONG. But on the other hand I don't know of any way the book would work WITHOUT all that very long lead-up. The lead-up is important and necessary to understanding why the various characters react as they do to Nicholas, and what exactly the ramifications of agreeing to get help for him would be. The world needs to be set up as this complicated place where there's this possibility of hope for Nicholas, but a hope that is in many ways quite awful, and Meredith needs to be set up as the sort of person she is, too, and -- oh, all sorts of things.
You couldn't open with Nicholas' nightmares about the monsters and his reactions to them, because without context, there isn't the same kind of tension.
And yet Nicholas is the heart of the whole thing, and until he arrived on the scene I was ultimately frustrated with the book and ready to give up on it. After Nicholas was introduced, I read nonstop and stayed up late to finish.
The ending is the other thing I had a problem with. It felt too facile, to quick, and kind of out of nowhere. The ending tries to establish Meredith and Roberta as finding family in each other -- family is a theme throughout the whole book, and the theme is largely very well-done.
Roberta's feelings of belonging with her girlfriend's (and then ex-girlfriend's) family, and how hard it is for her to break up with her girlfriend simply because she doesn't want to lose her family -- that's wonderful. And the relationship both girls have with Preston, and what they think of each other because of him. And the difficult relationship Meredith has with Constance and Jack, and Meredith's inability to trust her husband, and the way she gets so entirely tied up around her son to the exclusivity of everything else. Yeah. All that's really good. There's so much pain and difficulty tied up in families throughout the book, but still a longing for and a need for family.
But because of all that pain and difficulty, the reconciliation at the end just doesn't feel right, because it doesn't feel earned. It feels very much out of nowhere, and -- well, maybe it's just that the ending moved too fast. If there had been extra time spent on the development of this found family at the end, if it had been shown instead of told, it would have been much better. Because that sort of ending IS the right one for the story, but as it was it didn't quite work.
My final problem isn't actually a problem with the book itself, but a problem with my library, which inexplicably filed Shelter in the fantasy section when it is clearly scifi. And this meant that I read the book with the wrong genre protocols hanging out in the back of my mind, so when Nicholas started having those nightmares of monsters, monsters that needed to be appeased and fed, I found his reactions entirely rational, and even right. His discussions with Berta and Fred on the various options on how to deal with hypothetical monsters put me entirely in sympathy with him.
I was reacting as if there was a possibility that the monsters were real.
In a fantasy book that's a totally reasonable conclusion to draw, that Nicholas is doing the right thing! But of course this ISN'T fantasy, and Nicholas' monsters are the result of mental illness. Until the full story of what happened that night with the dead mice at school, though, I had trouble getting myself to believe that that was the case, that Meredith (and Roberta, and Fred) had genuine reason to be worried about him.
Anyways. Those are all the problems I had with the book. It's harder to talk about the things it does WELL, because there is SO MUCH it does well (particularly the full and nuanced characterizations of the people within it, and not just the main characters; and also the worldbuilding.)
(one of my favourite parts of the book was possibly Zephyr. She is just such an interesting person, one whom I would probably get very fed up with if I knew her, but who, through the intermediary of the book, I very much do like.)
But the book is really good, and reconfirms my opinion that Susan Palwick is an author to look out for. And I definitely recommend you read this, or another of her works, because she should be better known and more widely praised than she is.
OKAY IS THAT ENOUGH WORDS ABOUT SUSAN PALWICK YET?
(IF NOT I COULD PROBABLY FIND MORE)
Thank you!
(Anonymous) 2012-07-23 02:09 am (UTC)(link)FYI, my first book -- FLYING IN PLACE -- is *not* non-genre. It's fantasy, a ghost story, but a lot of people try to rationalize away the ghost because the book's about child sexual abuse, which is a Serious Subject, and fantasy Isn't Serious. You know how that goes.
My fourth novel, which *is* non-genre (although there's an invented fandom in it), is called MENDING THE MOON and will be coming out from Tor sometime next summer. I also have a poetry chapbook coming out in October: it's called BRIEF VISITS, about my work as a volunteer lay chaplain in a local ER -- not everyone's cup of tea, to be sure -- and will be published by Texas Review Press. And I'm working on at least two fantasy novels, although neither promises to be finished anytime soon!
Again, thanks for your thoughtful and articulate response to my work. Authors are always happy to know that people are reading their stuff and engaging with it so deeply.
Take care,
Susan Palwick