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We feature each week Nicholas Reid's reviews and comments on new and recent books.
We feature each week Nicholas Reid's reviews and comments on new and recent books.
“THE SUICIDE CLUB”” by Sarah
Quigley (Penguin / Random House, $NZ 38)
On the opening page, 20-year-old “Bright” (Brian)
O’Connor plunges (or was he pushed?) 19 storeys, falling symbolically past a
huge billboard of a sexy and half-naked woman, as his life flashes before him.
But, miraculously (and, dare I say, very improbably) his fall is broken, and
his life preserved, by a trundler full of newspapers.
The trundler is pushed about the city by 20-year-old
Gibby Lux (his parents were going to call him “Digby”, but they couldn’t
spell).
Both Bright and Gibby are oddballs – or perhaps geniuses.
Bright doesn’t get on with his pompous
father and his stepmother. He is a compulsive reader and writer. He appears to
live in a stationery cupboard. He has had one book published and is on the
verge of becoming famous. So what motivated his suicide attempt? Could it be
writer’s block – or the fear that he will not be able to follow up his first
book? “Every time he opens his notebook,”
we are told much later, “he’s back on the
ledge, with the pair of hands at his back. Then he feels nauseous and faint.
The blank white page is the inverse of empty darkness; both hold the terror of
limitless possibility.” (p.150)
Gibby is working towards being some sort of inventor,
always coming up with ideas for a new or modified gadget. But he’s socially
awkward, still lives with his parents, has no friends and is cursed with a
special hypersensitivity: “Other people’s
lives have always been a mystery to him. It’s the other things, the more hidden
things, that he can see astoundingly clearly. For instance, standing under a
tree, he sees the sap pulsing under the bark, pushing buds out into the wind.
He can hear the tiny crack of a root six
feet under asphalt. And if you stand beside him now, and look up the way he is,
you might start to see the separate componenets of the clouds, each one and
intricate woven ball of water vapour….” (p.173)
About
halfway through this longish novel we learn that for Lace: “Life is a long losing process. (She runs,
cries, runs.) Losing keys, losing wallets, losing coats slung over radiators in
cafes while the snow drops in thick flaky pieces from the sky. Losing your
virginity, losing your idealism, losing belief that there’s someone out there
who is looking for you. Losing your parents, sister, home. Losing faith, losing
hear. Losing your mind.” (p.202) And much nearer the novel’s end we get the
full, childhood, details of how such an attitude was implanted in her.
So
here are three lost and unhappy souls. I will not try your patience by saying
how or why, but these three characters become entangled. In the novel’s second
half, Bright’s father sends him to a psychiatric facility in Bavaria called The
Palace. Gibby, who has taken on the role of Lace’s protector, takes Lace to the
same facility. So they are involved in group discussions with the kindly Dr
Geoffrey and do much soul-searching. Also, a romantic triangle forms. Gauche
Gibby regards Lace as his enterprise and feels jealousy when Lace seems to be attracted
to the more flamboyant Bright.
I
told you it ends in a suicide, but I will not be so crass as to say of whom.
The author deserves not to have all her surprises and twists of plot revealed
so soon after a novel is first published.
There
are some good things in The Suicide Club.
The incidental comedy works in places – such as Bright’s strained attempts to
talk to his father’s chauffeur, Lewis, as he is driven to the sanatorium. Sarah
Quigley does, page for page, fill her tale with incident. But at a certain
point, some of this seems more like stretching out – or padding – a fairly
simple idea, rather than really illuminating the characters or telling us more
about them than we knew within the first hundred pages. At 400 pages, this is a
tale that could have been told more concisely. More rigorous editing would have
helped.
Worse,
as I read The Suicide Club, I kept
having mental flashbacks to the 60-year-old movie Rebel Without a Cause. Bright, Gibby and Lace are really James
Dean, Sal Mineo and Natalie Wood building their special relationship in the
face of horrible adults who just don’t “understand”. It doesn’t help that
Bright’s Dad is a one-dimensional stereotype (a hypocritical clergyman) and, of
course, when Gibby takes Lace to a party put on by his father’s business, all
the grown-ups are crass and repulsive. The three main characters are all aged 20, but
this is very much in the mode of teen lit that strokes self-pity. Are there
young people with emotional problems as severe as those depicted in this novel?
I’m sure there are, But Sarah Quigley’s resolution is pure Hollywood.
The
publisher’s flyer included a high-minded statement by Sarah Quigley about how
her novel was intended to encourage a more compassionate attitude towards
suicide. I think the attitude towards suicide which it really encourages is the
romantic one often embraced by teenagers.
See
the posting on A. Alvarez’s The SavageGod for a detailed discussion of this phenomenon.