The scenes of incest in the book are described in a highly sexualized way that Tallent attempts to make erotically charged, though the peculiar obsession with “spunk” is rather off-putting. My Absolute Darling indulges, at length, in a particularly masculine form of storytelling, in which extremely detailed and graphic violence is taken as edgy and bold, rather than pornographic.
The use of sexual violence against women for shock value and literary awards is nothing new, but that doesn’t make it less repulsive. Instead, he appropriates the most intimate and violating parts of women’s lives in a quest for critical acclaim. The heavy reliance on purple prose also leads to truly bizarre metaphors, à la: “She raises her head and ropes of muscle stand out from her mons pubis to her sternum like a bread loaf.”īut on a more fundamental level, the book fails to accomplish its author’s intention, one we’re familiar with thanks to a fawning interview in The Guardian, in which Tallent said: “We need more books like this, about survivors and abuse.” Tallent, like so many men before him, is apparently unaware of the huge body of literature by women who’ve survived incest and child sexual assault. Like many new authors, Tallent mistakes showing his homework for evidence of literary superiority. Turtle and her father are rarely found without at least one in their presence, an exaggerated mockery of gun culture that is evidently supposed to impress readers with its grittiness and meticulous detail. Excessively ornate descriptions of loading, cleaning, shooting, looking at, listening to, thinking about, and handling guns litter the narrative. Stephen King says it is good, ergo it must be good, and if you have a differing opinion, you clearly don’t understand the author’s work (though Roxane Gay wrote a sharp indictment.)īut My Absolute Darling fails on several levels: It is a poorly crafted novel with overwrought prose and an overeager attempt to demonstrate that Tallent has done his research, particularly with respect to guns. Books like these somehow manage to achieve a critical mass that critics dare not disagree with. Reviewers described the novel as “ unflinching,” “ cathartic,” “not exploitative,” and a “masterpiece.” Of course, having a mother who’s a famous Stanford professor and writer probably greased the skids for the reception of Gabriel Tallent’s debut novel. When her father stalks her there, she kills him. Turtle hits her tipping point when he rapes Cayenne, and she seeks refuge at the house of Jacob, a convenient authorial insertion who pops up periodically as a wholesome, aspirational example of masculinity.
When she comes of age and realizes that something is deeply wrong with her life, Martin disappears and returns with Cayenne, a 10-year-old girl who he’s grooming as her replacement. Told in a close third narrative style, the story revolves around Turtle, a young woman who has grown up more or less alone with her sexually abusive father, Martin. It’s decked out in all the hallmarks of high concept literary fiction-lots of laboriously flowery sentences endlessly strewn with adjectives, long periods of time during which nothing happens, and a grimdark aesthetic set in northern California. My Absolute Darling desperately wants to be the next great American novel. Spoilers for My Absolute Darling by Gabriel Tallent below:
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