A
review by Sarah Wolf
The
Mere Weight of Words by Carissa Halston is a heavy
examination of difficult relationships.
Written in the first person, the narrator is a young woman named
Meredith whose passion is language, something she uses as both a shield and as
a sword. Her estranged father is in the
film industry, something she seems to roll her eyes at throughout the
novella. Theirs is a strained
relationship long before they take a twenty year break from each other, only
reunited when she learns he is suffering from Alzheimer’s. “I am rankled over my inability to remember
a single turning point that soured my father in my mind. . . No monumental
signal…outshines the collective slights he paid us,” Meredith admits. Yet, still, her father punches an
overwhelming and highly negative impact on her self-esteem, her career path,
and even her romantic attractions. Too
late, she realizes she’s entangled with a man named Patrick who essentially is
her father, and this hefty conclusion sours her already dark spirit. “We’d never be all together separate. If I could have explained, I would have told
him that was the biggest reason he reminded me of my father. And that, sometimes, was a comforting evil,”
Meredith admits. Patrick is fixed in
her life, swimming through her blood, the sense of normalcy that she knows
best.
Almost
in defiance of these controlling men in her life, Meredith opts not to do what
anyone expects upon graduating from college and takes a job teaching English in
China. While she’s there, half of her
face goes slack and, just like that, she is a woman living with Bell’s Palsy,
which, in her case, does not correct itself over time, as it sometimes does. She returns to the States, stubbornly
refusing to tell anyone what happened to her as she makes her way in New York
until a friend from college convinces her to return to her native Los Angeles
and face up to her parents. This isn’t
traumatic with her mother but with her father, Meredith fears his reaction. Either he will declare her decision to go to
China an epic failure of her own creation or he won’t care at all – and both
outcomes terrify her. But what she gets
upon facing that fear is a father who expresses concern and offers to help in
any way he can. Meredith seems
unprepared for this response, so she lashes out and storms away, convinced he’d
rehearsed his empathy, convinced he is still a father who doesn’t care about
her. Of course, this leads her running
straight to Patrick, likely seeking the reaction she didn’t get from her
father. But even Patrick disappoints
her by simply asking how he can help and to hear the story of what
happened. Meredith overflows with rage
once more, refusing to tell anyone what happened to her, a seemingly odd decision
since, frankly, nothing happened to her but a stroke of bad luck.
Meredith
and Patrick fall back into their routine when they wind up in grad school
together at UCLA while her relationship with her father falls completely off
the radar, except, of course, in her heart where it’s a festering, unquenchable
fire. She resumes her study of language
and speech and the ways of words, lulling herself with patterns and
pronunciations and variety in terms of how language is used from culture to
culture and beyond. She applies these
patterns to her routine with Patrick and laments their inevitable
incompatibility, still knowing they will never be fully apart.
And
when the inevitable day comes that she finally stands face-to-face with her
father, now on the brink of dementia, she realizes she is still afraid of this
man, still afraid of his power over her, still afraid he is judging her to be a
failure, though he never speaks those words to her. “His legacy brainwashed me.
I was scared to be his successor, scared of being someone different,
someone detestable,” she says. Standing
in front of him, she feels every bit his daughter, someone built in his image,
tragic flaw for tragic flaw, and this cacophony of emotions causes a fight
or flight reaction as she spins on
her heels and leaves him almost as quickly as she came to stand before him,
likely for the final time in their breathing lives. On her way out the door, she thinks, “I didn’t need him, didn’t
want to admit to needing anyone. He
didn’t—doesn’t—need me. He never
did. That, but little else, I can
respect about him. That, but little
else I understand.” But in a twist of
irony, she calls Patrick and entwines him back into her life, thus aligning
herself with her father in a surrogate fashion, something that doesn’t bring
her happiness but it does bring her a sense of stability and assurance in her
ongoing path.
Halston’s novella is written with a great deal of
sour angst and an overriding feeling of gloom – Meredith’s unhappiness seeps
through the pages as her dry sense of humor and irony play out from scene to
scene, memory to memory. It’s unclear
what brings this woman joy at all – she seems to spend her time simply trying
not to be miserable, and often failing even at that. Hers is a lesson in grudges and unresolved emotional trauma –
hers is a case where she allows herself to live on with visible wounds,
something manifested in the form of Bell’s Palsy. Like any emotional trauma, some people recover more than others,
much like her physical disfigurement, and for Meredith, her scars are what
define her, not what help her transcend.
This is her ultimate tragedy – her biggest enemy is herself.
No comments:
Post a Comment