“When you believe in things you don’t understand you suffer”
Stevie Wonder’s words serve as the epitaph to Victor LaValle’s The Changeling; accurately summing up the ensuing 431 pages wherein we’re introduced to a genre-defying novel that mixes horror with the fantastic and monsters both real and imagined come a-knocking.
However, before we get to the things we don’t understand — the darkly fantastical, fairy tale element of The Changeling — we’re given a family saga, and herein lies the beauty of LaValle’s novel: We’re essentially given two novels in one, the first half being almost exclusively an introduction to the Kagwa family, before LaValle rips everything we’ve come to care about in the novel away and presents us with something entirely new. In this, the novel itself presents as a changeling. Does this approach work? Resoundingly so, but then again I guess fairy tales have been concerned with family dynamics for as long as they’ve been told, and work beautifully as a framing device for our modern family drama.
The Changeling starts on the streets of New York (the entire novel seems to be a paean to the city in which LaValle lives— here is a man who loves where he lives, and beautifully wrought descriptions invite the reader to do the same) in the sixties as protagonist Apollo’s parents — Lillian and Brian — meet, fall in love and bring Apollo into the world. Soon after, things go sour and Brian disappears into the ether of failed fathers. Lillian however fills the shoes of both parents, bringing up her child single-handedly while working a full time job until he’s old enough to turn his neighbourhood used book business into a viable career path. It’s on a trip to check out a book sale in one of the city’s public libraries that a now thirty-odd Apollo first meets Emma, who almost instantly captures his heart. Cue Apollo’s own courtship, marriage and the coming of their first child.
The novel’s split, for me, comes as Emma and Apollo visit a restaurant to dine with one of Emma’s oldest friends. Described as a kind of gingerbread house in itself this meeting, ending in Emma’s labour, is the gateway from the family saga to the fantastical. As we move away from the restaurant down our new path Emma delivers the baby, a fantastical feat in itself, on a subway train. There’s a beautiful section as Apollo cradles baby Brian who is still contained in the amniotic sac and feels connected to past, present and future but in that second is also, somehow, outside of time. We have our first real incident with social media here; it almost ruins the special moment, as the new family must be protected from the prying eyes and i-Phones of the rest of the commuters by a B-Boy troupe, who successfully avert the incident being splashed all over the media: “four black kids waving and smiling and looking gleeful… and generally speaking news outlets don’t find that sort of thing worth sharing”. This moment is also a comment on the delicate issue of institutionalised racism, which is another reoccurring theme, and one LaValle comments on often with an almost wry sense of humour.
From here on in, social media becomes an increasingly important part of The Changeling and the reader — alongside Apollo — is left questioning society’s obsession with social media and recording every detail of our lives. In one lengthy section social media trolls are likened to vampires, who traditionally we could keep out of our lives with locked doors but who now we’re almost inviting in as we share pictures of our families, check into locations and share times and dates of activities. It’s a sobering reminder of our online footprint which affects Emma and Apollo’s lives to the extreme and serves as a reminder to all about the monsters we’re potentially letting into our lives through the comfort of our computer screens.
However this meditation on the perils of social media isn’t brought to us before we’re invited to watch as Apollo spends much of his time uploading hundreds of photos of Brian to his social media accounts. As Emma begins to suffer from post-partum depression and withdraws into herself, Brian spends time trying to be the perfect father such as his dad never was, and documenting the day-to-day development of his son. Apollo, distracted by parenthood and his perfect new child, is therefore not so responsive to Emma’s decline, at one time telling her to shut up and take a pill when she’s obviously suffering: “that’s the first time you took my light from me” says Emma later in the story. The summation of Emma’s failing mental health, and the beginning of the fairytalesque quest comes in a particularly harrowing scene where Emma does something so terrible we’re left reeling. Why wasn’t this prevented, we wonder, as Apollo does, forgetting the earlier indications and neglect of Emma’s needs.
It takes Apollo a long while, and a stint on Rikers Island, to begin to process what Emma has done, and what starts as a journey to reap bloody revenge ends in the family’s redemption, by way of a skillful blend of fairy tales old and new that LaValle weaves with a masterful stroke. The Changeling takes us from the family home to an island in the centre of the East River inhabited entirely by witchy women and run by Cal (named, I suspect, for Callisto), to a cemetery, before depositing us in Little Norway — a haven of the old country, known for its folklore. It’s here that the family saga fully entwines with the fairytale to offer us a crescendo that although it’s shot through with the fantastical also works as a parable for the modern family, toxic masculinity, depression and social media oversharing.
The Changeling is a masterful work of modern family values and fears beautifully blended with the fairy tales whose innate job is to provide moral lessons. LaValle’s blending of tropes and genres rightly draw the comparisons I’ve seen to Haruki Murakami and perhaps more interestingly, Twin Peaks, and will earn The Changeling a very rightful place in the modern pantheon of fairy tales.
