Katelynn was alone in bed inside her parents’
lakeside house the day she saw the duck boat go under, and
no one was where he or she should be.
Her father, on the other side of the world, in Myanmar, was in the
company of his Burmese “wife.” Her mother,
on the other side of Hawk Lake, was fresh from the arms of Jerry Fishash. Jerry,
son of a rich, businessman father, grandson of an artist grandfather, was choosing,
for the time being, to inherit neither life. And the captain of that “duck boat” (a bus
on wheels one minute, a boat on water the next, one of those “quick-change
artists of the transportation world” salvaged from World War II) is Louisa,
ex-nurse, official senior citizen by her own
account. Louisa was going under too but fighting to free the water’s surface, while six of
her seven passengers tourists in the nearby bathhouse resort town in Arkansas,
out for a day on Hawk Lake stayed under and drowned.
Katelynn’s fighting her own fight, not going down the way Jenelle, her
best friend, senior year, high school, went under after the two of them dipped their
cigarettes into a barrel of mercury for a quick high, Jenelle dead from the
poisoning, Katelynn, now, “a human thermometer,
all pulse and response,” but on a slow road
to recovery. Harvey, Jenelle’s boyfriend, the guy who led them to the mercury in
an abandoned neon factory, is on his own road, and he’s not where he should be, not
what he should be either: gone but only for the time being, a secret 24-year-old who
returned to high school to act as star pole-vaulter, getting high school this time
“right,” until what seemed a matter of course
Jenelle, star student in the looks department, Harvey’s future wife;
Katelynn, “second prettiest,” second fiddle,
outlook unknown goes way off course.
Or is “off course” the real way of
the world, the one clear way things have of showing us they’re other than what
they seem, as Katelynn sees for herself inside the pages of Cary Holladay’s wonderful
debut novel, Mercury (from Shaye Areheart
Books)? Katelynn: poisoned by mercury but freed by mercury from “the hair spray and
volumizer, eye shadow and blusher, all the practicing
in the mirror to achieve the right
expression” and freed into what? Adult life for a
change, and it’s slippery, it hurts.
But mercury … what is it really? Mythical messenger sent to us to say what’s
what? Medical cure-all, as in the mercury
“baths” once performed in Katelynn’s very own
home town? Or tanner of hides, the maker of
“mad hatters,” as once was the case in
Louisa’s mother’s native New England? Or is it
more mirror to life regardless of time or place?
As when Katelynn catches sight of herself, staring down into that barrel inside that
former factory, seeing “her drowning silver face,”
the mercury turned “well,” “lake,”
“sea,” “ocean,” Katelynn thinks, high on
fumes, herself for once “exposed,” “all her
pretenses … burned away” should she survive
such a sight, and she does.
“Nobody is what they seem to
be,” Katelynn says so herself, as Louisa says
of her beloved duck boat, “land-self to
sea-self” with the flip of a switch. So too the
land/water wonders of the natural world that fill this intricate novel a tree frog once
found in an Ozark Christmas tree, a tortoise
housed as house pet before it too is sent to the
bottom of Hawk Lake, Hawk Lake itself rendered as a field of grain to be, according
to Jerry’s land-minded father, “reaped.” So
with such added, unnatural wonders as Tunica’s casino landscape: “They claim they’re
boats, but they ain’t … . It’s some law, they got
to say they float,” says Dora, a wild woman
with her eye on Jerry and an eye to blowing those casinos to smithereens, when, with her
natural smarts, what she’d be better off doing is aiming for law school. But that’s the size
of a novel that’s brimming with characters who cover more territory than can be covered
in this simple summary and that Holladay describes with crystal-clear understanding,
wry humor, and very sizable heart.
“I felt like it was a process of learning to read their hearts, as they
were learning to read each others’ hearts,” Holladay says of the characters in
Mercury. “And in fiction, as in life, that’s a very
useful device, but it’s not always that easy to
do. But I keep a journal of what I’m writing and I write what a character wants, what the
obstacles internally and externally are to achieving those desires. I saw both Louisa
and Katelynn as very much survivors. But Katelynn is apt to be asking, Am I
pretty enough? Will I be happy? Will I have someone to love me? When Louisa, in a
sense, has tried to avoid asking those question
all her life. She’s immersed herself in work all these years. Now she’s reemerging.”
Just as Holladay is emerging as novelist from the ranks of writers known
previously for their short stories. (In 1999, her
story “Merry-Go-Sorry” won an O. Henry
Award to go with her two short-story collections.) Just as this summer she leaves her job as
public-affairs manager for the Memphis Park Commission and reemerges in the
classroom to teach creative writing at the University
of Memphis (where her husband, poet John Bensko, also teaches), after past
teaching posts at LaSalle University in
Philadelphia, the University of Pennsylvania, and
Rhodes College. Did the switch to novel-writing
take getting used to?
“I had dabbled with writing a novel
before,” Holladay says. “But this was really
the first novel I tackled full-steam. I was just ‘caught’ by the characters, their
families. They took on a life of their own.
“We live our lives in a series of
moments and events, and accruing material, for a short story or a novel, is how I work.
But with a novel you’ve got the scope to cover a lot of emotional distance. Of course,
you can do that in a short story too, but it’s
more concentrated. I just felt very ready to
write. After my story won the O. Henry, I was contacted by several agents, and the one
I went with asked if I had another manuscript. I said I’d started on a novel, but
I was only 25 pages into it. He said send it, and he sold it right away. Editor
Shaye Areheart she’d just gotten her own imprint at Random House was very
helpful, excellent with suggestions. She and my agent are literary people in the best
sense of the word.”
Holladay cites writers Alice Munro, Lee Smith, Chris Bohjalian, and Lewis
Nordan as key contemporaries but recalls recently “being caught” by a quote she
discovered by G.K. Chesterton which fit her
feelings on Mercury especially: “We must learn
to love life without ever trusting it.”
According to Holladay, “I thought that’s exactly what these people are
trying to do Louisa and Katelynn with their consciences that won’t leave
them alone, all the characters, their relentless memories. It’s what these people are
going to have to do.”
With or without mercury’s curse or cure.
Cary Holladay signing and reading from Mercury
Burke’s Book Store
Thursday, May 23rd
5 to 7 p.m.