The Changeling
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Average rating4
When we first meet Pearl - young in years but advanced in her drinking - she's sitting at a hotel bar in Florida, throwing back gin and tonics. Cradled in the crook of her arm is her infant son. But the relief she feels at having fled her abusive husband, and the Northeastern island his family calls home, doesn't last for long. Soon she's being shepherded back. The island, for Pearl, is a place of madness and pain, and her drinking might dull the latter but it spurs on the former. Through the lens of Pearl's fragile consciousness, readers encounter the horror and triumph of both childhood and motherhood. With language that flits between exuberance and elegy, the plainspoken and the poetic, Joy Williams has created a modern fairy-tale, entirely original and entirely consuming.
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I cannot put into words the feeling I got when I finished this masterpiece.
This is the kind of book, though, that most people will hate with a fury that is rarely extinguished, and I can't deny them their hate, because this book is for people who don't mind loose ends dangling just beyond reach, and the plot still unexplainable after one tells it you what it meant (if there actually is one), and no one else.
This is about many things - alcohol, madness, children, trauma, consent, clairvoyance, solitude - and at the same time, it may seem rambling, precisely due to so many converging and diverging themes. Most books run with one or two, three seems like a stretch. This masterpiece handled seven themes with aplomb, and you get the suspicious feeling that this was because the author limited herself to seven.
TL;DR - read it if you're into Gainax endings, don't read if you like linear narratives and storytelling.
I don't understand. I don't understand. But woo boy is the world in this book wild and nightmarish.
