Me, Myself, and You:
Otherness in Scary Monsters
If you pick up Scary Monsters, A Novel in Two Parts, and flip it toward you on the x-axis, you will see another right-side-up front cover, the only difference the placement of a plug by Joan Silber: top right on one, “Scary Monsters is a marvel”; bottom right on the other, “A wildly remarkable book that unfolds like no other.” I agree with Silber, both times. As for the gimmick, the best I can do is intellectualize how it underscores the macro structure is not generated by halving a whole, but by intimately associating two separate and complete narrative arcs, Lili’s and Lyle’s (Lyle’s and Lili’s) each spanning the same number of pages, three to one-hundred-twenty-six.
Lili describes her coming of age in the early 1980s while, between university and graduate studies, she spends a year as an assistant high school English language teacher at the Lycée Jean Moulin in Montpellier—whereas Lyle, an immigrant in a near future right-wing Australia, more diffusely accounts for the habitual state of denial required to exist in the age of ever-cycling pandemics, institutionalized xenophobia, rejiggered pronouns, Zoom…and he is the one who poses us the riddle, “Which comes first, the future or the past?” Looking one direction, we think either in terms of nostalgia or regret, looking the other, between hope or fear—familiar thoughts—and so we are never in one place, but always two.
Two horrid syncopating images bracket Lyle’s section—the first his blithely earnest description of the premature euthanizing of his inherited pet dog, Alan, who at the vet’s office comes back into the room with the cannula in his stumpy leg. It was secured by multicolored tape, red, yellow, green, that stood out brightly against his fur…Finding me waiting for him, he lowered his ears in greeting, lifted his head, and stepped up his pace. He looked so gallant, trotting toward death with its cheerful colors taped to his leg. (8)
The companion image is found in the more lyrical dénouement, where Lyle is internally grasping after a rationalization for the decision to encourage his sick mother, who, to be sure, has a few years left in her body, to use “the Amendment” and end her life early, on her terms. Unlike Alan, Ivy has a choice, but unfortunately, unlike Alan, she feels unwanted. Evidence that Lyle’s subconscious mind is troubled by her capitulation to the idea: he spontaneously recalls a story Ivy used to tell about a trip she and her first husband, Lyle’s father, took to a remote primitive village to witness a collective marriage ceremony, which had been delayed a few days by heavy rains. She woke up early, stepped outside, and noticed that [a]ll the trees on the hills were hung with white. Later, walking about the village, Ivy would see all the fallen blossoms everywhere, tiny stars stuck in the mud. But standing in the doorway, she didn’t realize at first that the rain had caused the trees to burst into flower. “When I saw all that white,” said Ivy, “I thought, They’ve killed all the brides and strung them up in trees.” (126).
Is this less chilling than Alan at the vet clinic because it didn’t happen? Or proof we can not only swap the past for the future, but also the imagined for the actual?
Lili, also existing as a brown person within white ecosystems, is agnostic about a post-binary social order. When David Bowie’s Scary Monsters comes on at a get-to-know-you party, she says, “He was a scary monster for sure,” citing Bowie’s mid-seventies persona, the Thin White Duke’s “admiration for Hitler. [A fellow party goer] Deb said that Bowie hadn’t meant it like that. Every white Bowie fan I knew had told me the same thing,” Lili thinks (7). How to look at this—a Keith Moon type deal, who in addition to nurturing his own Nazi dress-up fetish, liked to blow up toilets with M-80s and then dynamite, always looking to progress his stupid pranks—or something better described as ill-considered bricolage, plugging into the cultural grid of the near past for the energy to shock the current hegemony? Unlike England’s WWII tradition of satirizing the Nazis to cope with strident, world-historical evil, these are post-ironic stunts—hard to find something poignant behind Bowie’s gesture, and so the best explanation moves past the claim of just putting out there a bit of misunderstood performative sarcasm to having been too long in an altered state jacked up on cocaine. At the party, just before the song comes on, Lili takes in Minna, half Jewish, half toney Catholic, who will soon become her new besty, “wearing a rosary lengthened at the back of her neck with extra links. She was sucking on the crucifix—when she took it out, it had a red lipstick stain” (7). Not quite David Bowie or Keith Moon, this, but not bad for a subtly profane goof.
At the beginning of Lili’s sojourn in the south of France, before she’s beleaguered by a new creepy neighbor, Lili experiences the fun type of otherness we have all delighted in when visiting someplace new, like when she observes a scene that occurs in an egg-shaped square at the center of an open-air food market: “I watched a man aiming rope rings at the necks of dazed, tethered geese. It struck me as a sight from another century, something Flaubert would have seen” (11). (The joke here is that Flaubert, famous for his obsessive realism, ravages the reader with detail. Unlike de Kretser, he would have gone on for-fucking-ever.) Each of us can’t equally, however, relate to how Lili as a woman manages the duality of sexual desire and fear of violence that seasons the middle of the narrative like toasted fennel seeds on a warm potato salad. Frequent references to rape and murder sensitize us to why her brain is wired to register and project threat. Lili’s bathroom outside of the apartment, up a stair, “stone pressing in on both sides”, becomes a trope for her perceived vulnerability. At night, the timer switching off the light below, she “would stand outside the WC, listening to the silence…[thinking of how the] Yorkshire Ripper had come out of the dark to stab Jacqueline Hall again and again with a screwdriver” (32).
Ultimately this fear, which even motivates the silly choice to walk home from the cinema at night with a gun, “an ancient stage prop” in her bag, transubstantiates into carefree sex—with Lucio, the Italian she met in Sardinia with Minna, who comes to France for the presidential elections, dreaming of a socialist future, and Minna’s boyfriend, Nick, after, of course, Minna inexplicably ghosts him with an it’s-been-fun-but-don’t-dare-try-to-find-me letter. In the final scene Lili recalls gathering with Lucio and the other celebrants on an outlook on the Promenade du Peyrou, looking across the void to the prison dubbed “Le Chateau” and noticing the captives also striking matches and flicking lighters to celebrate Mitterrand’s election, which inspires Lili to think of “an orchard breathed into life by white blossom.” She says, “It was one of those puzzling connections suited to dreams, but I’ve never doubted that it was really there” (126). This is true, we all know, in our here, our now, because white blossoms are, or rather can be, what we want them to be.
Trevor Payne is a writer and has been an educator for the Ladue and Radnor public schools for 25 years. He received his BA degree in English from Stanford University and MFA degree in Creative Writing from Fairleigh Dickinson University. Trevor was awarded the Provost Scholarship from Fairleigh Dickinson for the writing in his first novel - A Cup of Water. He has also served as a book reviewer for the Literary Review and is currently at work on a second novel.
