“The best part of all of you is underground if you keep thinking those people define you. Our grandparents were rotten seed. Kept secrets. Worshipped money. Pitted their kids against one another. But we aren’t them. We can break free.”
THIS REVIEW IS SPOILER FREE
I have attempted to review the novels of A. S. King countless times and in countless ways. My Google Drive folder for all my book reviews contains several half-finished documents in which I have tried and failed to explain what makes her books so great or perform critical analysis of their thematic content, because try as I might, the reasons why I love A. S. King so much simply elude me. My admiration and adoration are on a level that I apparently cannot articulate, but I’m going to try and do my best with her most recent novel, Dig.
Dig started off feeling a little bit lost, the separate strings of the seven point of view characters loosely tangled and gradually growing more and more taut as the story progressed, until the final act, when the strings finally tightened all the way and an impossible knot formed in the centre. I had a vague sense of something approaching with these characters, some of whose names are not revealed until the last few chapters of the book. Their storylines are mostly detached from each other until the very end, but they are also all linked by a familiar thread of anger and restlessness. There’s the Shoveler, a jaded young boy whose mother shoplifts pork loins from the supermarket to help them get by and whose father he has never known, who carries a snow shovel with him everywhere he goes to make him feel safe; the Freak, an apparition of a girl who flickers from place to place, searching for the home to which she can never return; CanIHelpYou?, who deals drugs out the drive-thru window at Arby’s, hates her racist mother, and is in love with her best friend; Malcolm, a lonely wanderer whose father is dying of cancer and is about to leave Malcolm completely and utterly alone in the world; Loretta, the strangest of them all, who commands a circus of train-hauling fleas and spins through the world in a too-big, red-sequined dress; and Marla and Gottfried Hemmings, the grandparents to these five teenagers, two distinctly unhappy people who have been married for nearly 50 years. Marla and Gottfriend are the poisoned root at the heart of it all. Through sheer dumb luck, they sit atop a seven-figure bank account that Marla refuses to share with their five children, determined as she is for them to thrive without any help. The result of this selfishness is an extended family that despises half of its members and isn’t aware of the rest, a family rotten right down to its core. Marla’s greed and selfishness have festered through the limbs of the family tree like a metastasizing cancer, breeding and perpetuating resentment, but the five teenagers venturing through the wasteland of a life descended from the Hemmings’ have caught sight of the festering wound at the heart of the family, and they can dig themselves out of the tunnel if they can get their shit together.
To be frank, Dig is weird. It’s weird and strange and confusing and not always especially coherent, but that’s the A. S. King trademark, and it’s the thing I have loved about all of her novels so far. King’s stories are not simple, nor are they straightforward. They refuse to provide you with easy answers, instead making you work long and hard to decipher what it is that King is trying to say. Dig is like a puzzle that you can’t begin solving until after you’ve finished reading. The first time through it, you’re just uncovering all the pieces, separating all the edge bits, grouping together all the pieces that look like they belong together, figuring out how you want to approach this; you can’t really begin putting all the pieces together to form a clear picture until after you’ve finished the book, when all the threads have been untangled. This is a book that I think would absolutely reward repeated reading. I almost want to read it again right away, because even though I feel like I somewhat understood this book, I also know that the puzzle is never going to be complete until I go back and approach it with what I know now.
But what do I know now? When I’m trying to guess what A. S. King books ‘mean’, I never feel like I’m getting it right. But that, I think, is what makes her books so special: they are so open to interpretation that I don’t have to worry about being wrong, because the author’s influence doesn’t dominate the meaning of the story. So here’s my interpretation: this is a story about family, both blood and found. It’s a story about race, about a white family whose kids are woke and whose parents and grandparents are not. It’s a story about resentment, about kids who resent their parents, parents who are doing the best with what their own parents gave them, which is not a lot. It’s a story about being lost, being trapped, about not knowing how or where you fit, about being an outcast, alienated, a freak, about resenting the alienation and about being so absorbed in it that you don’t even realise how strange it is. It’s a story about surviving, about coping by any means necessary, and sometimes failing to cope at all. It’s a story about five fictional teenagers, but it’s also a story about you and I and everyone we know and love and hate and respect and despise. It is about systematic oppression and ignorance of problems that are right before our eyes and digging, digging tunnels to hide ourselves from harm but also digging our way out, because life cannot be avoided by simply hiding underground. Am I right? Who knows, but it doesn’t matter: what matters is that this book somehow makes no sense and all the sense in the word, and this collection of oxymorons is the reason why this is one of my favourite books of the year, and yet I can’t even really tell you why.
Sounds vague? You bet it was. The synopsis/analysis I’ve provided above was a monster to write, because A. S. King’s novels are almost impossible for me to explain with any sort of coherence. I understand them, but I can’t unpack them, because the ‘message’ isn’t overt or obvious or presented to you in an easily digestible way. Dig is not an ordinary novel, because King is not an ordinary novelist. This book most definitely won’t be for everyone, but for me, it was perfect; in my eyes, King can do no wrong.
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