Tatterdemalion by Ray Succre Reviewed by Erin McKnight ISBN-10: 0955496489 The author’s accomplishment lies in the rendering of his unnamed and undiagnosed narrator. Ray Succre’s ability to represent this protagonist’s world as shifting continuously outward is remarkable steady. The narrator’s collision with insanity is broad and far-reaching; his psychological projection upon fringe characters draws them into an environment in which their very presence directs his instability, as opposed to a steep and narrow decline into an isolating paranoia that at its very nature precludes the reader. Set against the backdrop of a Boston that falls just short of realistic, the protagonist achieves consistent accessibility—while his physical presence lies beyond readers’ mental grasp, the possibility of reaching him within the book’s three-hundred pages is never extinguished. Tatterdemalion succeeds at simultaneously unraveling this man’s sense of reality, while witnessing his attempts to preserve family bonds: the brother run over as a teenager, the mother whose death followed shortly thereafter, and the father whom he watches dissolve into the pavement after a much-primed opening-night theatrical performance. Even as he teeters on the brink of total psychological collapse, however, the narrator manages to consciously retain memory of these figures; in so doing, preserving the very sense of emotional closeness that prevents him from stumbling over the precipice and into an abyss where delusions seize complete control over his behavior. The narrative starts out conventionally enough, the protagonist despairing over his father’s refusal to accept the “responsibility . . . to wither. That his body had yet to degrade in an acceptable manner [proving] upsetting . . . .” In relying, however, on deceased family members for support—specifically his father, and to a lesser extent his older brother—the narrator’s dry wit and sense of humor, which are evident in his familial interactions and which pervade even his most bizarre experiences, ensure that he doesn’t slip into implausibly redeemable territory. The negative forces of confusion and an overwhelming sense of inadequacy prove successful in overshadowing the protagonist’s inability to establish equilibrium in his day-to-day life, evident in his fruitless search for lasting employment. These controlling emotions, and resulting career pitfalls, are tempered only by his discovery of the creatures that occupy the appliances in his apartment—the impermanent yet tangible and, at times, brutally vivid beings that alternate between indulgence and vilification, as they compel him to write better poetry and seek out a mystical jar that will help him reclaim his life. As the creatures’ level of violence escalates as a result of their inability to help the narrator achieve publication success escalates, the protagonist’s dissolution is compounded by a search for work that finds him the target of a protest. With effects compounding exponentially, in terms of the mass of people picketing non-stop against his supposed act of animal cruelty, the narrator finds himself a participant in the “anti-[him] protest”: a member of the “cloistered mob of souls that had gathered to show [him] how much they despised [him].” The level of danger in this group of participants that he considers “a few murders shy of a crusade” intensifies rapidly, as additional people are “hired” with the sole objective to draw the real him from his apartment. This rally, serving allegorically to expose his deluded methods of self-preservation as ultimately further endangering his psyche, coincides with his father’s disappearance and forces the painful realization that although he is surrounded by people who are animated by anger, and bombarded with the resounding voices of his past, the only tangible entities in his life are actually forcing him from it. And when his father—the only individual anchoring him—is lost to the recesses of the narrator’s mind, my level of concern ironically rises as my interest in how he will manage to find the jar and his path back to sanity wanes. It is at this point that the author’s sense of control is most apparent, as I perceive the protagonist’s reality in the same vein he does—as unwelcome. While Succre effortlessly dismantles the narrator’s outlook on his receding existence, he succeeds, too, in piecing it back together for the reader—perhaps a little too well. The narrator, within a setting that remains fantastic and intriguing, yet vaguely plausible and familiar, straddles a characterization that labels him unknown in a very intimate sense. Succre’s epilogue robbed me of some of the mystery, the magic; its denouement proving a little too neat to support the nature of the work preceding it. Had I ceased reading at Chapter 15, my satisfaction with the protagonist’s behavior in literally slaying the dragon and stepping back into the mental void he created would have supported my attempts to untangle the events I felt so viscerally a witness to as a result of Succre’s trenchant writing. Continuing on to the Epilogue certainly didn’t detract from Tatterdemalion’s overall experience, but Succre so carefully crafts the narrator’s world that I found myself unprepared for the “rewards” of clarification and explanation. I wasn’t ready to be scooped from the choppy, yet warm waters of the narrator’s mind into the author’s boat of an epilogue; I required more time and a greater sense of psychic space, perhaps reflecting the protagonist’s mental motion outward, in which to craft my own theoretical possibilities for a character whose name I now know.
Erin McKnight is a Scottish writer now living in Dallas, and is Fiction Editor for Prick of the Spindle. Her writing has been widely published online and in print, in venues including flashquake, Ginosko Literary Journal, and PRECIPICe. Her short nonfiction has been nominated for a Pushcart Prize and inclusion in W.W. Norton’s The Best Creative Nonfiction, Volume 3. Erin holds an MFA in creative writing with a specialization in fiction, and is currently at work on an MA in literary linguistics.
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