Sharp Objects

** spoiler alert! ** 

This almost never happens to me, but I accidentally ruined Sharp Objects for myself. I was reading an article on female psychopaths in literature, and although I could see at a glance that Gone Girl, which I've already read, was mentioned, I had no idea that this spoiler was embedded until I had already seen it:

In the world of Flynn’s novels, female psychopaths abound. Women with minds beyond the pale, who defy explanation, who would murder a classmate and line a dollhouse floor with her teeth.

Because of that, learning the central twist of Sharp Objects, I had a much different reading experience than someone would who hadn't seen it, so I need to review it differently, too, I suppose; there was no thrill in the thriller, but the mystery did remain as the killer could plausibly have been Adora or Amma right until the end.

Camille Preacher is a mediocre newspaper journalist (by her own account) for Chicago's fourth-rated newspaper, and when a second little girl goes missing from her tiny hometown of Wind Gap, MO, Camille's editor sends her down there (against her will) to get the inside scoop. Right from the start you know there's something a bit off about Camille: She notes early on that she always takes baths instead of showers because, I can't handle the spray, it gets my skin buzzing, like someone's turned on a switch. It is eventually revealed that Camille is a self-cutter, having recently been institutionalised to recover from years of carving words into her skin. As the book progresses, whenever Camille is under stress (and who wouldn't be under stress investigating child murders and needing to stay with the unwelcoming mother and step-father that she thought she had escaped from?) different words on her body insist on her attention : I felt the word wicked blaze up by my pelvis. This happened so often that it began to feel a bit corny, but the idea of an incredibly beautiful young woman making herself grotesque was just off-kilter enough to keep it interesting.

In Wind Gap, Camille sees her 13 year old sister Amma for the first time in 10 years, initially not recognising her as the leader of a group of nasty young blondes in pushup bras and short shorts -- the type of girls who would giggle and pick over the memorial gifts, the teddy bears and candles, left at the scene where the second young girl's dead and toothless body was dumped (Aha, I said, the pulled teeth…). At home, Amma is Pollyanna in sailor dresses and hair ribbons who plays with her "fancy" -- a dollhouse that is an exact replica of the Victorian mansion their family lives in (Aha, I said, the dollhouse…). Out on the town, Amma is a Lolita-wannabe, sucking on lollypops and teasing boys and men alike. 

Camille is also forced to face her mother, a proper Southern Belle type who, as the book goes along, changes from frigid, to menacing, to deadly. I liked this scene:

My mother lunged then, grabbed me by both arms. Then she reached behind me and, with one fingernail, circled the spot on my back that had no scars.

"The only place you have left," she whispered at me. Her breath was cloying and musky, like air coming from a spring well.

"Yes."

"Someday I'll carve my name there."

Creepy, eh? This scene took Camille's point of view from petulant (why doesn't my mommy love me?) to fearful (what is my mother capable of doing?) and upped the tension just when it felt like the story was lagging. And as it turns out, Adora is indeed capable of murder -- her Munchausen by proxy syndrome killed her middle daughter, Marian, when Camille was 13, and Adora drugs and poisons Camille and Amma in order to care for them, too. It is eventually made clear that Camille's cutting is a self-directed form of this same impulse, but instead of harming others, Camille wounds herself in order to repair herself.

In an essay, Gillian Flynn explained that she was interested in writing a book about the violent side of women:

So I did. I wrote a dark, dark book. A book with a narrator who drinks too much, screws too much, and has a long history of slicing words into herself. With a mother who's the definition of toxic, and a thirteen-year-old half-sister with a finely honed bartering system for drugs, sex, control. In a small, disturbed town, in which two little girls are murdered. It's not a particularly flattering portrait of women, which is fine by me. Isn't it time to acknowledge the ugly side?

And that's pretty much what Sharp Objects accomplishes -- it isn't a nuanced portrait of small town America or an in-depth look at gender roles and expectations, but it is a shockfest, reminding us that girls and women can also perpetuate a cycle of violence through the generations. I did like when Camille told off Richard, the Kansas City homicide detective, in this scene:

"You're sexist. I'm so sick of liberal lefty men practicing sexual discrimination under the guise of protecting women against sexual discrimination…(S)ometimes drunk women aren't raped; they just make stupid choices -- and to say we deserve special treatment when we're drunk because we're women, to say we need to be looked after, I find offensive."

I believe that's true, but it's the only truly insightful thing I remember Flynn putting in this book. And as for the writing, there are so many metaphors and similes that Sharp Objects had an over-written feel to me, and here are a few random examples, some maybe better than others:

Richard blew a hollow toot with his beer bottle, a mating call to a passing tugboat.

My mother's voice swept high and raw, like a red scarf in a storm.

I ached once, hard, like a period typed at the end of a sentence.

A dried-out tree rustled its branches against my window screen as if it wanted to climb in next to me for comfort.

And as for the plot, the central murder mystery and its investigation were interesting enough, ruined of course by my foreknowledge of the solution, but there were several plot points that I just didn't buy: I didn't believe that Camille, even with her messed-up psyche, so needed to be one of the cool girls that she would agree to do drugs with her 13 year old sister, and especially the Rolling Roulette scene; I didn't believe that, the same day as she had sex with Richard with her clothes on (the first time she had done so in 10 years), she would have fully naked sex with a vulnerable 18 year old kid (the first time she had done that in 14 years); I didn't believe that the frightened and bullied girl Jodes could keep the murders a secret; and I didn't believe that when Camille went to tell Richard that she thought her mother was a killer, he told her to go home and act natural because he had already planned to execute a search warrant on her house the next day. 

In the final analysis, this wasn't a great work of literature, but it wasn't unenjoyable, either -- I would rate it slightly above Gone Girl, perhaps 3.5 stars. Darn spoiler.

One more interesting quote:

Thank goodness for Bobby. Three years after the disappointing Ann -- was he an accident or one last shot of brio? -- Bobby was given his dad's name, was doted on, and the little girls suddenly realized how extraneous they were. Especially Ann. No one needs a third girl.

There are quite a few instances in Sharp Objects where Camille wonders if families are happy to have all girls, or young mothers want to have just one more baby to get that boy, or in one case that girl, that will make their families perfect. Even though it's a common enough worldview (maybe especially in a small Southern town?), it feels put on with Camille -- after all, her mother had three daughters and her specific brand of mothering and smothering doesn't seem like it would transfer to a son -- I get the impression that in her own family, there wasn't any disappointment in having a third girl; it's probably exactly what Adora hoped for.

And what's so great about having sons anyway in our post-hunting and -farming world? When I was pregnant with Kennedy, I just wanted a healthy baby, and when she was born, she was exactly what I wanted. When I was pregnant with Mallory, part of me did hope for a boy -- not because I think they're better than girls, but because the image of the boy + girl = "Millionaire's Family" was successfully imprinted on me -- and when my beautiful second daughter was born, she was exactly what I wanted. And know why we didn't have a third child? There was no outcome that would have been good for Mallory -- if we had a boy, it would look like we kept having babies until we got what we really wanted. If we had a girl, Mal would have been the Jan Brady of the family and who would do that on purpose? Dave was also happy to have two girls -- he's not a hunter or a farmer or a hockey Dad with NHL dreams (he was actually happy neither of them was interested in playing hockey at all); there's nothing he would want to do with a son that he can't do with his girls -- the trips they make to Fan Expo and comic book stores together attests to that. 

If this blog is meant to be in part a record of the truth of my family, believe this -- neither of our daughters was a disappointment to us, most certainly not because they were daughters -- and that isn't just something we told ourselves after the fact. Both these girls were planned for and wanted and cherished from the moment they first lay on my bare chest and howled into my face.

And another thing that struck me: In the quote above where Camille is calling Richard sexist for practising reverse-sexism, she was internally thinking about her first sexual experience. At 13, Camille had gotten drunk and allowed herself to be passed around four football players at a party. When she referred to the incident as something that happened to "a girl in town", Richard was shocked and said that that certainly is rape. Camille challenged him -- is it because of the age of the girl that makes it rape? Could a grown woman go out drinking and decide to hook up with four men? As the mother of daughters, of course I want them to be safe and protected from harm at all times -- but I also think they need to take responsibility for themselves, too. Case in point:

Within the last year, there has been the tragedy of the suicide of Rehtaeh Parsons, a 15 year old girl who went to a party, got very drunk and had sex with one or more of the guys there. As she was hanging out a window, barfing presumably, one of the guys was photographed with his groin grinding into her bare butt, apparently having sex. When that picture began circulating around school, when the slut-shaming began, the girl claimed she must have been raped, and she ended up hanging herself. The story is so terribly sad and preventable and of course the boys should be charged with something -- taking and circulating a picture like that has since been criminalized in Canada, and that's a good start towards making this not happen again, something has to change culturally with young people today -- but according to Rehtaeh's friend's eyewitness account, it all looked pretty consensual. Was it rape exactly? Was 15 too young to give consent? Should every young guy be programmed to believe that a drunk girl who says yes really means no? I believe there's a campaign to that effect on University campuses, and maybe that is the right solution -- it would protect the young men involved too after all -- but what of Camille's claim that, "I'm so sick of liberal lefty men practicing sexual discrimination under the guise of protecting women against sexual discrimination"? The character would have us believe that, at 13, she knew exactly what she was doing when she gave herself to the football team. Even her sister Amma, also 13, says, "Sometimes if you let people do things to you, you're really doing it to them,"  explaining that letting people behave like monsters gives you the power of making them monsters. 13. Know what I remember about 13? I thought I was grownup -- I was my full height and pretty much had my adult body by then. I wasn't giving myself to the football team -- or to anyone else -- but I really did think then, and actually considered it in hindsight through the years when terrible child killer stories came out in the news, that everything I did was with the full knowledge of consequences. If the Columbine shooters had survived their attack, I think they should have been tried as adults -- they knew what they were doing (mental illness is a separate issue). But back to sexual consent and what this really made me think of:

When I was 17, my good friend Curtis and I were out for a drive and when we stopped to talk, as we often did, he nervously told me that there was a book under my seat that he wanted me to look at. I pulled out a book that was called something like How to Tell People That You're Gay. Now, this was Lethbridge, redneck bible-country, and I would have sworn that I had never met a gay person in my life. It was also the early 80's and we all knew we were supposed to be afraid of the gays and their AIDS. Yet, it took me about a second to process the situation and I said, "Okay, what do you want to talk about?" He was relieved (I was the first person he had told) and we talked, me cautiously asking questions that I had hoped weren't too personal -- did he have a boyfriend, did he ever?

He told me that his first encounter was with a friend of his mother's and it was nurturing and eye-opening and a loving introduction to the real truth of his existence. I was creeped out by the idea that this was a man old enough to be his father -- I wouldn't want for a girlfriend to tell me a similar story about some old guy -- but Curtis assured me that this was a normal introduction to the male gay community. I don't remember now if he had been 14 or 15 during his first encounter, but at the time, and even now in retrospect, I do believe it was consensual. But although his experience was reportedly not coerced, there obviously must be a cutoff age for consent -- Mohammed marrying a 9 year old when he was in his 70s is objectively wrong, but was Jerry Lee Lewis marrying his 13 year old cousin really so wrong when it was culturally accepted where they were from? On the other hand, where child marriages are culturally accepted around the world today, that doesn't make them right...

Some interesting topics to muse upon...


Edit added the next day:

Honestly, I don't care now nor did I ever care about who is gay or bi or whatever, but the definitions have changed so much since I was a teenager (I never heard of "two-spirited" until recently, and also recently new to me has been seeing people arguing on internet forums about whether there's any such thing as "gender" anyway), and I am happy that our girls are also open-minded, but this conversation last night was a head-scratcher to me.

Mallory mentioned a boy from school and Kennedy said, "Is he gay?"

Mallory replied, "Yeah. Totally gay."

"I thought he told me bi once," said Kennedy.

"No," replied Mal, "totally gay. And now he's with Amanda."

"Wait a minute, Amanda's a girl, right?"

"She's a binary," explained Mal. "Right now her binary is set to male."

"Oh, okay."

So, the totally gay guy is with a girl, whose binary is currently set to male, and that's not, somehow, a heterosexual relationship? Whatever floats your boat...