The Changeling by Victor LaValle
My rating: 4 of 5 stars “when fairytales were meant for adults” “This fairytale begins in 1968 during a garbage strike.” The first sentence of Victor Lavelle’s The Changeling (2017) introduces his approach to the urban fantastic: mix the everyday minutiae of city life with the (cracked) magical. He writes many details of every day life in NYC, including subway trains, street names, parks, the arches of the Manhattan Bridge and Washington Square, the Buddhist temple in Chinatown, and the Fort Washington branch of the public library, as well as many other vivid details about things like making a Crockpot chicken dish, preparing a pot of tea, digging up a grave in a modern cemetery, selecting books at an estate sale, assembling a home computer system, watching TV shows like Home Improvement, posting baby photos on Facebook, and so on. Behind that detailed surface of real NYC life, Lavelle writes a magical world of wishes, witches, trolls, and changelings. His fusion of the mundane and the magical extends to metaphors and similes, many of which either make the everyday fantastic, as when a tea kettle screams like a tiny dragon or a lighted bus at dawn “might as well be a chariot pulling the sun across the sky,” or make the fantastic everyday, as when a coughing troll sounds like a car engine that won’t turn over. The novel depicts the painful growth of Apollo Kagwa (named for Rocky’s foe-friend) towards understanding the “glamour” that hides inconvenient parts of real life like the suffering of the weak and towards learning the truth behind his father’s apparent abandonment of his mother and him when he was an infant and behind changelings and parenting. His discovery of the magical reality lying beneath the everyday world gives Apollo “an overdose of the improbable” best dealt with by acceptance (to believe only the practical, rational, and the realistic is itself a kind of glamour) and love (between parent and child, sibling and sibling, friend and friend, husband and wife, etc.). In that context, Lavelle interestingly explores the nature, meaning, and value of fairy tales, referring as a touchstone to Maurice Sendak’s Oustide Over There, doing plenty with the fact that fairy tales were originally for adults, explaining an interesting message of Rapunzel (it’s difficult to protect children from the outside world), and exposing the dishonesty of “they lived happily ever after” endings. (I wish Lavelle had done more or less with Outside Over There than he does, for he has Apollo find and re-read or remember multiple copies of it, but only deals with Sendak’s story up to Ida’s discovery that an ice changeling has replaced her baby sister.) Lavelle’s book is also very much about race, including the trepidation with which black people (especially men) view white policemen and the suspicion with which they are viewed by shop owners and anonymous concerned citizens. There are some scenes of Walking, Doing Business, Catching a Taxi, and Talking in a Park While Black, all handled with pain, restraint, and humor (as when Apollo’s best friend Patrice is antsy about being out with him at night in a white neighborhood, not wanting to have survived a tour of duty in Iraq only to end up shot at home by a nervous policeman). Harper Lee’s To Kill a Mockingbird plays a key role in Lavelle’s novel, but Apollo knows that the sequel, in which “Atticus Finch is all racist and crabby,” reveals that “Ms. Lee knew the deal,” such that the later novel is “too honest” to be popular. His book does a lot with gender, too, appropriately gendering its monsters and victims. At one point Apollo’s mother Lillian explains things from a female point of view: “I tried to be nice about saying no to Charles, but some men, you can’t be polite to them. If you’re polite they think it means you’re undecided. They hear your tone and ignore your words.” Like the race themes, Lavelle also handles the gender themes with humor, as in his riffs on “New Dads,” contemporary men who earnestly participate in bringing up their kids: “New Dads didn’t know how to do serious home repair, but they could pay for it.” Even as it is a painful, horrifying, and moving novel, then, it is also a funny one. Lavelle has a winning dry humor, as when Apollo’s friend Patrice makes a big show of covering up his password entering device on his fancy computer system, and his wife Dana says that she knows all his passwords, because she checks his phone where he keeps them. Throughout, Lavelle writes witty lines, like “Maybe having a child was like being drunk. You couldn’t gauge when you went from being charming to being an asshole.” He also writes a lot of life wisdom, like “Posting online is like leaving your front door open and telling any creature of the night it can enter,” and vivid descriptions, like “The sudden feeling of terror felt hot as sunlight against the back of his head.” He also capably reads his own novel. He doesn’t change his voice to become female or young or old characters, etc., but obviously knows exactly where to pause and when to intensify and reads clearly, and his voice and manner are appealing. I do think Lavelle unconvincingly leaves a few key questions and motivations unanswered and unexplained in the end, writes some almost too brutal and graphic violence, and divides his story into too many short chapters (a common feature of contemporary fiction). And the second half of his novel, when we’re sure that the fantastic is operating, is less compelling (to me) than the first half, when we’re among disturbing ambiguities. In its fusion of the everyday and the magical in a NYC setting, Lavelle’s novel reminds me of John Crowley's Little, Big, but with more horror and more consciousness about race and gender, and readers who like well-written urban fantasy with humor and horror and social relevance should like The Changeling. View all my reviews
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