capsule reviews
maureen mchugh, maša kolanović, daphne du maurier
Bit of a theme emerged in these three reviews, I think….
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Mothers and Other Monsters (Maureen McHugh, 2005)
After the Apocalypse (Maureen McHugh, 2011)
I had never heard of Maureen McHugh until she was recommended to me by friend of the newsletter
. I read these two collections and was quite sad that there are, at this time, no more collections. I found that McHugh’s goodness kind of snuck up on me as I was reading—at first I felt like there was a kind of basic quality to her prose, i.e. fine but nothing special, but then at some point I fell into her rhythm and now even when I go back to the first stories I read I can’t pick out a passage that clearly explains why I had my initial reaction.1The stories in Mothers and Other Monsters have no particular organizing conceit, but the stories in After the Apocalypse are more or less what the title promises: in each story, a different sort of apocalypse has taken place , and the stories are about those who are, one way or another, coping with the situation. It might be zombies or a plague or a series of dirty bombs or a conscious AI, but in any case, these are not stories about attempts to avert or even roll back doom. These are stories about getting on with it. In both collections, McHugh revisits the same thematic elements frequently (several stories are about dementia) but her most interesting recurring theme, to me, is mothers who do not really love their children, or love them in some basic, biologically-imposed sense but don’t like them or want to be around them.2 Whether or not these stories are in the official apocalypse collection, “being a mother” functions as a type of apocalypse here, a catastrophe these women learn to live around without ever accepting into their lives.3
The other thing that marks McHugh’s stories, to me, is the possibility of extreme violence, violence which might never happen but which will come with little warning when it does. The first story in After the Apocalypse, “The Naturalist,” takes place in a future United States where some prisoners are sentenced to live in abandoned zombie-infested towns. At first it seems like the prisoners have managed to make a sort of workable society for themselves; when this falls apart, it seems like Cahill, the character we’re following, will pick up the mission of trying to maintain human society in the face of monsters. Instead, Cahill devotes his time to studying zombies, what they are attracted to, and how they find their prey—which means capturing other prisoners and leaving them to be devoured alive for Cahill’s education.4
The most startling story, violence-wise, is probably “The Cost to Be Wise,” which is in Mothers and Other Monsters.5 This story fits into a subgenre that I think was basically started by Ursula K. Le Guin—stories of human anthropologists translated into science fiction settings.6 The community that the anthropologists work with is governed by the rules of what the anthropologists themselves consider “appropriate” (“technologies…based on the needs and capacities of people, they must be sustainable without outside support”) and by the “six precepts of development philosophy.” That is, they observe and even educate, but they don’t “interfere” by introducing new technologies the local population cannot create themselves.
In fact, however, these rules are their own form of interference, leaving the community artificially delayed in development in comparison to the tribes outside, which are able to trade with offworlders. Those tribes have acquired weapons like guns and in the end it doesn’t much matter if you can’t manufacture a gun if the person on the other end has not got one. When the inevitable happens, the anthropologists do not interfere except to get one of their own number out.7 But the people whose lives are at stake are left to deal with the results.
NB: Small Beer Press, which publishes both these collections, has DRM-free epubs on Weightless Books. Here’s Mothers and Other Monsters and here’s After the Apocalypse. I haven’t used Weightless Books myself so those aren’t affiliate links, but the store comes recommended by the publisher so I assume it’s a good place to purchase.
Underground Barbie (Maša Kolanović, 2008, trans. Ena Selimović 2025)
It’s been a bit since we’ve had a pointlessly long journey to finding a book: in this case, John Darnielle posted about a (different) book from this small publisher, leading me to the publisher’s website, where I discovered they have a subscription program, which I signed up for, which led to the delivery of Underground Barbie. This is a novel-in-short-stories about a girl growing up in Zagreb in the nineties after Croatia has declared independence from Yugoslavia, and it follows her as she deals with the most pressing issues of her life, namely, her Barbie collection. Her childhood is illustrated by equally childish (and very charming) drawings of Barbie escapades and events in real life that conspire to separate her from Barbie—like piano lessons.
I’m not sure I’ve read a book that captured the deranged way kids really play with their toys like this book does: the ever-changing, frequently violent and bizarre soap operas unfolding among your set cast of doll characters. I’m not really an expert on the Yugoslav Wars—and thus could not tell you if there is a level of satire here that I missed—but what I found compelling about it really was the degree to which this book embraces its childish priorities. The story “The Last Twin Peaks” shows the narrator and her family trying to watch the show even as the broadcast is interrupted by a series of bomb threats that are drawing ever nearer:
My brother immediately rushed to the balcony and listened anxiously for nearby planes, while Special Agent Dale Cooper, after taking a sip of his “damn good coffee,” continued to toil away in his investigation, not only into the mysterious circumstances and dark forces involved in Laura Palmer’s homicide, but also into the firepower of the Yugoslav People’s Army and Serb extremists, having no clue about this part of the script, which David Lynch and Mark Frost had never uttered a single word about to him. Parallel to new evidence, a fresh news crawl appeared with additions to the list of cities where aerial threats had already been announced. Cities were spawning, emerging in the lower right corner of the television screen and moving slowly toward the left, disappearing only to appear again. Meanwhile, the image of Laura’s killer suddenly flashed before her mother’s eyes, and it became critical to create a face sketch of the murderer, AIR-RAID SIREN IN SLAVONSKI BROD; Special Agent Cooper was then woken by an anonymous caller who assured him that he would reveal the killer at a confidential meeting with the agent at the hospital, RED-ALERT SIREN IN DUBROVNIK. As a police officer drew a portrait of the killer Mrs. Palmer described, Cooper raced to the hospital, where he was greeted by an eccentric one-armed man with a tattoo that read “fire walk with me” and was told that the killer was hiding in the basement, AIR-RAID SIREN IN NOVA GRADIŠKA. Cooper headed to the basement, where he discovered Bob the AIR-RAID SIREN IN VIROVITICA killer, and joining his fight against the forces of darkness was the town sheriff AIR-RAID SIREN IN VELIKA GORICA, which even we could make out from our balcony.
When I read this I knew I was going to like the whole book. And I did. As with McHugh’s stories, this book depicts people who are trying to live through and around catastrophe, but since these people are also children, it affects their daily sense of reality slightly less. They are already used to being dragged around by adults and life in its everyday sense seems to be going on, so this new world of bomb threats and refugees is simply accepted as a new adult imposition on their lives. I appreciated the irreverent spirit behind this book—which seemed to refuse any world in which war is something of more consequence than Barbie.
(For a longer and more in-depth piece of criticism, I recommend this.)
The Breaking Point (Daphne du Maurier, 1959)
In Daphne du Maurier’s short story “The Pool” a girl is entranced by a pond that she sees as a sacred place. She makes offerings to it and longs for a unity with the pond. One night, she sees a woman offering her passage into the world beyond. But then, by accident or by cowardice, the girl misses her shot: puberty arrives and she knows she’ll never be offered a chance again. The feeling of dread that permeates the story resolves itself—it wasn’t that our heroine might be misled, by herself or by something, into drowning herself, because in fact that might have been a happy ending. It was rather that she was running out of time and did not know until it was too late.
“The Pool” is a story governed by a strong sense of what Le Guin calls “appropriateness,” the logic that operates in fairy tales by which an action turns out to have been the right or wrong thing to do.8 It ultimately vindicates all of its heroine’s practices and preoccupations: there really was another world with other rules open to us and now it’s gone. The ending is cold, abrupt. We exit the world of appropriateness into something else, an adult world in which to be appropriate means only to be polite.
Is Daphne du Maurier “good”? For some reason, I find this question hard to answer. She eludes my judgment, seems to exist in a space that isn’t good or bad. The single touch that makes her novel Rebecca immortal, I believe, is not its creepy mansion or Mrs. Danvers (though they help) but the moment when the narrator, “the second Mrs. de Winter,” discovers her husband killed his first wife and experiences, not horror, not disgust, but overwhelming relief:9
….the rest of me sat there on the carpet, unmoved and detached, thinking and caring for one thing only, repeating a phrase over and over again, “He did not love Rebecca, he did not love Rebecca.” Now, at the ringing of the telephone, these two selves merged and became one again. I was the self that I had always been, I was not changed. But something new had come upon me that had not been before. My heart, for all its anxiety and doubt, was light and free.…
I was free now to be with Maxim, to touch him, and hold him, and love him. I would never be a child again. It would not be I, I, I any longer; it would be we, it would be us.
Everything about Rebecca that is a little clumsy, or overwrought, or otherwise flawed disappears in this single moment.10 This is the moment you understand that the second Mrs. de Winter is not simply a timid mousey victim, seemingly rescued from a life of being bullied by rich old women only to end up in a life where she’s bullied by a rich older man and his terrifying servants, but, rather, completely insane in her own way.
Daphne du Maurier was, to put it mildly, a strange person.11 And she had, in her fiction, the courage of her strangeness. When crafting her couples, she does not seem to believe in romance or sex but some stronger primordial and nameless thing that underpins both. There’s a sense of having met one’s fate and, if you’re lucky, it’s a nice fate, but you’ll submit to it either way.12 The placement of what is horrifying, what is satisfying, what is longed-for and what is abhorred—du Maurier never puts these anywhere except precisely where she feels them, and where she feels them is not where you’re supposed to. Her short stories are not only odd in their premises and tone but often have abrupt, almost inexplicable endings. It’s as if some point is reached at which this kind of thing simply can’t go on. So it doesn’t.13
The novels of hers that I’ve read (Rebecca, Jamaica Inn) don’t have this quality; she knows how to end them and they are true “page turners” (don’t start Jamaica Inn before you have to get up at 5:30 in the morning). Her short stories are a whole other thing, which is why I keep reading them, but also why I find it hard to have clear thoughts about them. Are these weird endings, these unanswered mysteries, representative of ways in which she was either unwilling or unable to follow out her visions past a certain point—or do they represent rather, an uncompromising dedication to what she sees, such that even a “climax” can’t really be the sort of climax a normal reader like myself (derogatory) can intuitively feel? Are these stories deliberately incomplete or complete in some way I haven’t opened myself up enough to see…? Sometimes I think the answer is just “yes” to both questions.
Maybe the closest, from the first story I read, “The Naturalist”:
Whittaker was a white guy who was sort of in charge. He’d made a big speech about how they were all more free here in the preserve than they’d ever been in a society that had no place for them, about how there used to be spaces for men with big appetites like the Wild West and Alaska—and how that was all gone now, but they were making a great space for themselves here in Cleveland, where they could live true to their own nature.
This dynamic emerges in its most shocking form in the title story of After the Apocalypse.
McHugh is surprisingly open about the fact that at least one of these stories is a lightly fictionalized version of her own relationship to her own stepson.
The story where I think McHugh started to click for me was “Useless Things,” which is a very moving story about somebody who resists the necessity of violence for as long as she possibly can, but who is eventually driven to prioritize her own survival.
This story was apparently expanded into a novel, which I have not read.
Even if Le Guin was not the first writer to ever do this, I think she is the one everybody else is “in conversation” with. I recently read and liked (though probably won’t write about) Adrian Tchaivovsky’s Elder Race, which is another Le Guin–inflected space anthropologist story that was weirdly easy to imagine as a Studio Ghibli movie—I mean that in a good way.
Though aside from the one that gets out, they all die.
It took me forever to find that this was a Le Guin observation and that she wasn’t quoting somebody else—at first I thought it was Maria Tatar (who I have not read), then I thought it was Marie-Louise von Franz (who I have read), then I finally looked at The Language of the Night to see who she cited and I was like ah… she don’t cite no one. But she does talk about von Franz right before, which is probably why I thought it was her quoting somebody else. Anyway, here’s the bit for the curious (it’s from “The Child and the Shadow”):
In the fairy tale, though there is no “right” and “wrong,” there is a different standard, which is perhaps best called “appropriateness.” Under no conditions can we say that it is morally right and ethically virtuous to push an old lady into a baking oven. But, under the conditions of fairy tale, in the language of the archetypes, we can say with perfect conviction that it may be appropriate to do so.
This is a moment that could not be reproduced in the (otherwise excellent) Hitchcock adaptation as the Hays code did not allow people to get away with murder and so instead Maxim de Winter becomes that favorite Hitchcock type, the innocent man who looks guilty. It works (unlike Hitchcock’s movie Suspicion, which suffered a similar fate and which I think does not work at all, but that’s another post for another time).
This phrase written after reading this paragraph in the foreword to The Breaking Point, about Daphne du Maurier discovering her husband was having an affair and, apparently, briefly losing her mind over it, entering a state “a state of despair, anger, guilt, anguish and paranoia”:
Looking back over the patterns of her marriage, with the hindsight of an outsider, this might seem strange. After all, Daphne had not been faithful to her husband: there had been a series of affairs, with men and with women, dating back to the 1930s. For years, they had seemed a semi-estranged couple, leading separate lives, she in Cornwall writing, her husband in London, the perfect courtier. For years they had been reunited only for holidays and at weekends, when Browning made the long and arduous train journey to Cornwall. Nor was this the first instance of Browning’s capacity to entangle himself with other women: he had embarrassed and infuriated Daphne with what seems a fairly innocent, if foolish, infatuation with a young woman who worked in a shop in Fowey (the town closest to Menabilly). What her husband seems to have been seeking was kindness, ordinariness and companionship; the isolation so essential to du Maurier was fatally wounding to her husband. Indeed, although he recovered from the 1957 breakdown to a degree, his last years were sad ones. He was to die in March 1965—his wife did not attend his funeral, despite being devastated, just as, many years earlier, she had not attended her father’s.
People just don’t have marriages like this anymore… that’s the problem with literature today.
The ending of Jamaica Inn, for instance, which would be very romantic in another writer’s hands here seems to say that our heroine has elected to spend her life away from all she loves to stick by a man who is no good for her, and she’s done this because… that’s just how it goes.
One thing that is unavoidable if you read a lot of her short stories is that Daphne du Maurier really, really, really did not like being a woman in a way that seems to go deeper than “chafing against societal expectations.” (Dipping a toe into her biography will confirm this, but you don’t need to do this to notice it.) There are stories in which the end of potential happiness corresponds to undergoing female puberty (“The Pool”), another in which pre-pubertal life is referred to longingly (“The Archduchess”), yet another in which a woman escapes marriage to join a kind of cult that, in story’s original draft, apparently changes her into a man (“Monte Verità,” see footnote one in linked paper) though in the published version the woman simply becomes a leper. I don’t think the reader is obligated to draw any particular conclusion from this fact but… it is a fact.
“normal reader like myself (derogatory)” merch when
you’re exactly right about Daphne du Maurier!