New(ish) Books
Fernanda Melchor and Rachel Aviv
FERNANDA MELCHOR’s Paradais (2021)
Terrific if a little simple.
I honestly don’t have much to say or add to this book - and definitely have no criticism of it. I’m a bit surprised that more novels aren’t written this way - the story of a caper, or some dramatic event, narrated through pure adrenaline. What’s noteworthy about Paradais, I suppose, is the love for the run-on sentences. Melchor takes a real gamble here. The masters of the run-on sentence, Thomas Bernhard, John Banville, for instance, tend to be dealing with very slow, reflective stories, the sentences as a capacious space for thoughts to curl back in and contradict themselves. The conventional wisdom in writing action is that it has to be short and sharp - “If you want it to be hot, you have to make it cold,” as Robert Bresson advised in a slightly different context. And Melchor knows, I think, that she’s pushing things, that she’s constantly running a risk of repetition, of exhausting her fairly limited subject. After the opening exhilaration I started, by around page 40, to get a little weary for yet another recapitulation of Polo’s drinking or of Fatboy’s sex fantasies or the description of just how horrid Fatboy’s body is. By the time we get to the interlude of Milton’s abduction, Melchor seems to feel that she owes us, and owes herself a break - the hyper-charged prose is no longer really suited for a couple of teenagers drinking and bullshitting by a dock, that it needs to be put in the service of a real gangland story.
But Melchor knows what she’s doing and never loses control. The great strength of Paradais is the sense of escalating darkness - the characters trapped in some internal prison and each successive prison, as the narrative unfolds, proving more and more unbearable. These prisons are, successively, Fatboy’s entrapment in his own body and his unattractiveness; Polo’s in his dead-end job, incipient alcoholism, inter-generational poverty; the Paradais development in their gated-community vapidity'; and then, more bracingly, Polo in his sexual liaison with Zorayda, Milton in the gang, Polo in these hellish moments when events move out of control and he becomes a kind of witness to his own life, he and Fatboy playing with the gun, resting at his mother’s place and unable to keep himself from continuing with the caper, waiting in the garage before carrying out the attack, taking drink after drink in the kitchen while Fatboy works up the nerve to rape Marían.
This way of writing about crime is much more compelling and accurate than anything related to ‘motive.’ The attack carried out by Polo and Fatboy is on the order of a ‘motiveless crime’ - it’s completely idiotic and Polo knows the entire time that it’s idiotic. But it’s experienced, as Polo thinks of it, as “a series of independent, almost soundless instants.” Each moment - and this goes all the way back to the beginning of the novel - is its own distinct hellscape. Each glimpse Polo has of himself as a rat in a trap leads to an attempted escape which yields an even more intricate and unbearable trap. The narrative has a certain irresistible logic in it - Polo attempting to find some sort of bottom, something equivalent to the maniacal toughness his grandfather has when he flays off a piece of forefinger from a power drill, and he does actually get there in the end, swimming through the dark water of the estuary and then collapsing on the floor of his family home.
It sort of goes without saying that Paradais becomes a metaphor for Mexico, the stark class divides, the hopeless status of the menial ‘muchachos,’ the culture of violence - the sense that violence presents itself as the only means to cut through the knot of corruption and exploitation. Melchor, as a master, steps lightly over the metaphoric dimension of her story. The only place she slips is somewhere in the middle of Milton’s tale, which lapses into stock types - the woman, “whom there is no fucking around with,” who runs the gang.
But that’s perfectly fine. The mood of Paradais is splenetic and grotesque - as splenetic as anything I’ve come across in literature for a long time (Céline and Boris Vian come to mind). The black heart of a novel like this allows for exaggeration, for certain flights of hyperbole - as, for instance, in its abiding disgust with the human body, not just with Fatboy’s ‘tubby’ physique but with a parade of half-erect, shamefully erect, and shamefully non-erect penises, with the ‘round, brown ass’ and ‘desperate pussy’ of Zorayda, with the ‘blow-job lips and ‘sumptuous tits’ of the beauty Marían herself. Everything is reduced to vile bodies, to an excoriating misanthropy. Melchor carries out that perspective brilliantly - it’s very hard to imagine how she could better structure the novel - but the problem with that approach is obvious enough, that it’s very difficult to get any air or light in. I’ve been reading Céline recently and it’s clear that he was struggling with the same difficulty - there is a point in that black-hearted, wild lucidity where the prose, however brilliant, becomes repetitive, predictable. The way out in that style is a very peculiar kind of negative transcendence - Dante hits it, actually somewhat crudely, at the end of The Inferno, Dostoevsky, Henry Miller, Céline at their best all hit it, as does Ottessa Moshfegh in My Year of Rest and Relaxation. The point is religious - that god, to be meaningful, must be accessible even from the depths of hell. Melchor, as far as I can tell, doesn’t quite get around to saying that - in her fiction, the devil is ascendant, her world stays largely sociological (a corrupt and broken Mexico) rather than theological, and the world she depicts is, to put it simply, just an unmitigated downer with no transcendence even hinted at.
RACHEL AVIV’s Strangers To Ourselves (2022)
Doesn’t exactly hold together as a book but that’s ok. Just read as disparate case studies it’s enthralling and a good primer on the state of psychiatry.
Aviv’s point, I guess, is just a gesture in the direction of a more holistic, common sense approach to thinking about mental illness. The guiding impulse for Strangers to Ourselves is Aviv’s story of being hospitalized as a childhood for anorexia - and of finding that the clinical treatment exacerbated the condition. It’s a complicated story and Aviv doesn’t pretend to have full clarity on it. Her feeling is that her anorexia was a bit more a trick of the mind than the people around her seemed to suspect - “it’s a reading disease,” she writes, “also a math disease” - and that the reflex instinct to pathologize it didn’t do her any favors. Instead, her stint in a hospital exposed her to older, hardcore anorexics, who viewed her as an apprentice to be instructed in the anorexic arts. For Aviv, the cure seems largely to have been a matter of growing out of it. “I was ‘recruited’ for anorexia but it never became a ‘career,’” she writes. “It didn’t provide the language with which I came to understand myself.”
Aviv’s experience gives her the intuition that there are a lot of stories out there that are like hers - where the treatment is worse than the disease; and labeling and pathologizing create a reductive sense of what’s going on while greater attunement to the ‘patient’s’ subjective experience yields at the very least a richer perspective. I’m all for that, as are most people in the abstract - there’s a kind of common consensus that our society is vastly over-medicated, that something has gone terribly wrong with psychiatry as an industry, which has a great deal to do with simple professional greed but also with a somewhat faulty model of understanding the psyche. But try to branch out from an individual experience like Aviv’s to more blanket statements about treatment of mental health and it quickly becomes very difficult to formulate simple conclusions.
Aviv, to her credit, knows that she’s not in position to propose some sweeping overhaul of mental health. It’s completely clear from some of the cases she documents that serious medical intervention and heavy doses of medication can be necessary. By the epilogue she has reached a very different place than the book’s jaunty opening would seem to be taking her. For Hava, a co-patient of Aviv’s, it’s evident that even extreme measures were insufficient - that Hava’s anorexia was pathological and life-threatening and wasn’t simply something that would be grown out of.
So if Strangers to Ourselves feels a bit thesis-less and as if it’s pulling its punches, well, that’s for the good reason that there are no easy answers in the subject matter it’s dealing with - what would work for one patient wouldn’t work for another, and if it’s possible to conclude a book with something along those lines (a celebration of different modalities of treatments), even that is not so easy to implement in an industry that requires some degree of regimentation and consistency of care.
And the lack of a thesis or, really, of narrative cohesion does not diminish from how extraordinarily interesting it is to view ‘abnormal psychology’ from the inside-out, without the medical industry’s reductive terminology, and to see things with the nuance that ‘patients’ bring to bear in thinking about their own lives.
The single most interesting story, I suppose, is that of Bapu, who clearly had a case of pronounced schizophrenia - but whose schizophrenia was basically indistinguishable from divine inspiration and who was able to write gorgeous poetry that she believed derived directly from Krishna and that passed all the tests for divinity as determined by religious scholars. As Aviv notes, it’s perfectly possible to envision therapeutic cultures with completely different conceptions of the value of treatment. “Indian healing cultures were meant to raise the self to a higher ideal,” she writes, paraphrasing N.C. Surya, “rather than simply to restore the person to a baseline called normal.” Bapu’s case is a clear instance of what is lost in the urge to over-medicate - all the rich traditions of mystics and holy fools that would be zapped back to normal in any over-medicalized culture.
That’s a sort of familiar story - the artists’ take on ‘insanity,’ memorialized in countless books and films as well as in a quasi-clinical iteration in R.D. Laing’s anti-psychiatry movement - but Aviv, characteristically, reaches a more ambivalent position. Bapu may have been inspired, and part of a hallowed Indian tradition of mysticism, but she was also really schizophrenic, abandoned her family, lived in squalor, and struggled herself with the feeling that she had gone crazy and been abandoned, ultimately, by Krishna.
That story seems to end in aporia and indeterminacy and same goes for the story of Naomi who threw her two children off a bridge, one drowning, one surviving, as a sort of frenetic protest against the realities of being black in America. Not surprisingly, Aviv is at her most tentative in this section - writing as a white woman and feeling an incapacity to form judgments on anything connected to the African-American experience - and she becomes so careful that, in this chapter, she hardly says anything at all. To explain Naomi’s action, Aviv goes very deep into antebellum history. “One of this country’s founding myths is that Black people don’t go crazy,” she writes. As an explicit parallel to Naomi, Aviv gives us the story of William Freeman, a black man with severe neurological damage who in 1846 was denied a reasons-of-insanity defense and sentenced to be hung. Aviv concludes this tour with the reasonable-enough point that psychiatry pays insufficient attention to black people while evincing “a lack of curiosity about the ways that race and economics shape [mental health]”. But the examples she selects are so extreme that they don’t exactly point in the direction that she would like them to. There may have been a miscarriage of justice in the Freeman trial, but, to be fair, Freeman had killed a family of four, including a two-year-old. And Naomi’s relatives themselves have to remind Aviv that Naomi’s killing of her child really was an unforgivable act. As Naomi’s partner Khalid - a member of a Nation of Islam splinter group and no admirer of the judicial system - puts it, “The severity of the situation deserved some accountability.”
Aviv is clearly more comfortable telling the story of Ray Osheroff - the patient who ‘killed’ psychoanalysis - and the story of Hava, her hospital friend. The Osheroff tale is, I guess, pretty well-known within psychology, but it was fascinating to me and spoke to a deep fissure in the American conception of the self. Psychoanalysis had been something very close to a religion in the post-war period; as Abraham Maslow had movingly put it, “The world will be saved by psychologists in the broadest sense or else it will not be saved at all.” But by the ’70s, psychiatry had emerged with a very different and very non-pietistic approach to mental health - the happy pill; or From Sad To Glad, as Nathan Kline’s pioneering text efficiently put it. In that perspective, there was no need to process all of one’s childhood conflicts, there was a treatment of symptoms and a clear trajectory towards ‘wellness’; and, within that mentality, there was an accompanying disdain for the high priests of psychoanalysis with their ‘pharmacological Calvinism,’ their emphasis on the ‘art’ of treatment as opposed to actual, measurable results. By the end of the decade psychoanalysis was on the defensive; and in the Osheroff case - a patient suing an elite clinic for failure to cure him - it was humiliated. From that moment to this - and I think Aviv is absolutely right to focus on that period as a pivot point - the American conception of the self becomes primarily based on biochemistry; psychiatry supplants the older psychological models; and a matrix of pharmaceutical companies, the medical industry, and liability concerns drive the treatment of mental health.
Aviv’s book is part of a gentle but concerted movement to turn the dial back - to restore pride-of-place to therapy, to insist on a more holistic mode of treatment. (Her contribution, slightly different from say Bessel van der Kolk’s, is to point out that people are not just their gray matter; that they are also their cultures and lived experiences and that some more nuanced understanding of these dynamics is called for.) But, at the same time, Aviv is too careful, too nuanced even to call for greater nuance. In her reportage, she becomes aware of cases in which it’s not enough to just treat the patient as if everything’s normal, in which more radical interventions (like pharmacology, like hospitalization) are called for. There’s a very bracing encounter with the father of Hava, who dies eventually of her bulimia nervosa. “Children with significant psychiatric illnesses are tolerated for a period of time when they are cute and cuddly and small,” Hava’s father tells Aviv. “But once it gets beyond that period, it is tremendously upsetting for older people, in terms of their own anxieties. And then, at some magical point - I’m not sure you can define it - these children, instead of generating empathy, become uncomfortable freaks.”
That’s the sort of brutal truth that a grieving parent, with no filter, can deliver - and it seems to contradict all of Aviv’s carefully constructed balances. Of course people need to be more empathetic towards mental illness; of course treatment needs to be more holistic. But, as Hava’s father curtly informs Aviv, sometimes none of that works - and it’s possible to do everything right for a patient and to have that to be nowhere close to enough. So, as is usual for Aviv, back to aporia - she advocates for a more sane way of dealing with mental illness but with the self-nullifying caveat that, often, mental illness can be completely insane, that there can be no good way to treat it.
Thanks for sharing brahim. Look forward to reading these books!