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Review of The Complicities of Stacey D’Erasmo

Review of The Complicities of Stacey D’Erasmo

 


After reading the hard-hitting new novel by Stacey DErasmos, complicitiesyou may suddenly feel the need for Google’s wife Bernie Madoff.

While not strictly parallel, this saga (of colossal public shame) echoes D’Erasmo’s opening premise: protagonist Suzanne tries to create her own anonymous, quiet life after her ex’s imprisonment -husband Alan for manipulation of funds.

You don’t know how it was insists Suzanne after her divorce and solo move to Chesham, a small coastal town in Massachusetts. As she admits Alan committed a crime bigger than a breadbox, smaller than Chernobyl, Suzanne’s fury erupts over the size of the fallout, which is wildly disproportionate, she maintains, with the transgression: Did anyone care about our family and what was happening to us?

Well, not at first. But very soon we do. Urgent and personal, Complicités reinforces DErasmos’ reputation not only as a skilled shaper of disparate fictional worlds and beings, but as a fierce investigator of what it can feel like to live inside them.

Elizabeth Strout has millions of stories to tell

In turn, Suzanne reflects on the reasons for her own relative innocence. Although old friends accuse her of allowing Alans to scam, she swears she never really knew or understood. I thought he was smart about currencies and exchange rates, but it turned out he was doing something else, she explains. You have to to know be really complicit, and I didn’t.

Is she trying to convince herself? Other people have done much worse things. Pol Pot. Drug cartels. Sex traffickers, she reasons. And we weren’t like those Wall Street buffoons…the new rich you can see coming a mile away by the unearthly glow of their dental veneers.

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What makes the story come alive, to DErasmos’ enduring credit, is its persistent grounding in the physical. Suzanne rents a funky little house and invents a job as a masseuse (certified online). Falling from a carefree privileged social class to grittier realities proves difficult: fighting over money, trying to appease a suspicious landlord, staying warm in winter, the skin-to-skin demands of work -same. From one client, observes Suzanne, all of her bones were pronounced…which made her massage curiously anatomical, even medical.

But Suzanne’s foray also leads to discovery: she is good at massage and likes to help people. For the first time in my life, I knew exactly what I was doing. … Even though my whole life had crumbled behind me and my future was uncertain to say the least, I was content.

That is, until some people come after her. With grace and suspense, D’Erasmo layers stories of key individuals in Alan’s life allowing readers to piece together a composite portrait of this charismatic, smooth and elusive man: Sylvia, the mother who abandoned him; Lydia, the disfigured woman he marries after his incarceration; and Noah, Suzanne’s estranged young adult son with Alan. Each of their stories is almost like a little novel in its own right: ultra-strange, ultra-human.

But another, stranger story surfaced: that of a dead whale. Many, many pages are devoted to the description of the enormous stranded mammal that a heroic group (without spoiler) fails to save. The event upsets Suzannes’ thoughts. How could I have been so blind to what was really going on in the world? Our concerns were nothing compared to all this. The ocean was alive, it was a world in its own right, and it was seriously threatened.

Local opinion (scientists, citizens) is bitterly divided on how to proceed. Funding is a giant problem. As the creature’s carcass rots on the beach untouched, Suzanne (who had tried to help save it) frequently goes to meditate beside it.

Much of the marine science is detailed, including reporting on local and national political wrangling. Despite this intrigue, passionate intentions and a clear role emblematic of a complicity different and imposing from ours, in the destruction of the Earth, I struggled with the sense of its imposed feeling and, with its abundant explanations, almost become an infomercial. DErasmo finally makes it work, linking Suzanne’s passion for the crucial symbolism of the death of whales to her rather stunning later choice.

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Of the novel’s varied subjects, families, couples, love, sex, guilt, eco-peril, economics, Alan’s kaleidoscopic portrayal is the most tempting. Here, D’Erasmo’s ideas shine. “Was he a genius, a psychopath, a hypnotist? Was he such a fantastic crook? Alan gave us his scent of the extraordinary, of the possibilities of lives we never thought we would have.

Presumably, the doomed whale provides some sort of macro-trope to go along with the micro-version embodied by Alan. Many will feel that this one-two punch raises awareness in the reader. Certainly, D’Erasmo’s writing is tight and tasty; his lively thought; its warmly idiosyncratic characters; its causes are timely, complex and morally charged. That may be more than enough.

Joan Franks Juniper Street: A Novel and Late Work: A Literary Autobiography of Love, Loss, and What I Was Reading will be out in October.

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2/ https://www.washingtonpost.com/books/2022/09/24/complicities-novel-stacey-derasmo-review/

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