darryl

I couldn’t shake the feeling that Clive was the protagonist, especially towards the end, which make sense, given the framing of the novel is that Darryl is subservient to these other, more “alpha” men, even narratively. I liked how much the novel is about other characters that Darryl has surprisingly little curiosity about: he reduces them to flat images, but their actions, of course, betray this in surprising and narratively spikey ways. Embarassingly, it took reading some interviews with Ess to realize exactly how unreliable Darryl is supposed to be as a narrator, and how long the distance is between his point of view and the author’s. I certainly read him as a tragic character, but still parts of his tragedy eluded me: most notably, his inability to have any real connective empathy with other marginalized people beyond a stamped sort of cliché recognition: “other people have their struggles too, I suppose” et cetera, et cetera. I think that the novel reflects a real human kind of self-obsession that masks itself as interest in the external world. Darryl ostensibly spends the entire novel being curious of others, but this curiosity always ends quickly in a platitude when the object stops being surface-level-relevant to Darryl’s questions about his own life.

The writing is beautiful, hooky, and fun. The ending I felt to be stunted and strange at first, but in light of Darryl’s sort of myopic introspection, seems like it follows naturally from the themes. If anything, the book seems like both a fascinating and moving tale of real self-discovery, and also the limits of a “self-discovery” that refuses to turn fully outward with real open-ness and compassion.

Further reading: Triangle house interview with Jackie Ess