DIG by A. S. King (2019)

“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.

THE ALICE NETWORK by Kate Quinn (2017)

“What did it matter if something scared you, when it simply had to be done?” 

THIS REVIEW CONTAINS SPOILERS

The Alice Network is a classic World War II literary fiction novel, split into two perspectives with alternating chapters. We follow two women in dual timelines: Eve Gardner, who is recruited as a spy during WWI; and Charlie St. Clair, an American socialite searching for her cousin, who disappeared during WWII. Novels set during this time period oftentimes stun me with the raw and devastating stories that they tell, but unfortunately, The Alice Network failed to amaze me, and particular elements actually disturbed and disgusted me. I can’t wait to get into why.

In WWI, we follow Eve Gardner, whose story is the superior of the two. Eve wants to contribute to the war effort, but because she has a strong speech impediment, she is stuck in a dreary typing job. When she is discovered by a British captain who realises that Eve’s speech impediment will make an excellent disguise, she jumps at the chance to join the Alice Network, a network of female spies gathering German intelligence for the Allies. She begins working in a restaurant owned by Frenchman René Bordelou, the patrons of whom are exclusively German, as René’s vision is to provide somewhere in France for German officers to relax and unwind. He is the perfect person for whom Eve could work, but he is also dangerously perceptive, and Eve must make compromising choices in order to maintain her cover. Eve’s story was superior to Charlie’s because it actually had stakes. The novel begins in 1947, where we meet a very different Eve to the voracious recruit in 1915. We want to find out why Eve has become so disenchanted, so volatile, and so broken; we want to know what happened to her, and this means that her story has stakes for the reader right from the start. On the whole, Eve’s perspective is also a lot more interesting than Charlie’s; to me, the story of a spy working undercover in wartorn France is much more entertaining than a bratty 19-year-old scouring the French countryside for her estranged cousin. I wish that this novel was solely from Eve’s perspective; it would likely have been a four or even five star read if Charlie wasn’t involved.

Charlie St. Clair, on the other hand, is a much less compelling character than Eve. At the start of the novel, Charlie is traveling to Europe with her mother to get an abortion, as she has become pregnant by a boy at her college. However, her real ambition is to find out if her cousin Rose survived WWII, so she gives her mother the slip and hunts down Eve at her London home, as Eve is connected to a report Charlie tracked down that could determine Rose’s whereabouts. Several reviews have complained that Charlie is bratty and childish, and I don’t disagree, but that’s not the thing that I disliked about Charlie’s perspective. It was just… lackluster. It didn’t have the energy or the thrill of Eve’s storyline, and Charlie had a lot of annoying quirks that made her insufferable to read. For one thing, she referred to her unborn child as her “Little Problem”, which strongly reminded me of Anastasia personifying her subconscious and ‘inner goddess’ in Fifty Shades of Grey, so I obviously couldn’t stand that. Charlie is also meant to be a math genius, and so I was hoping that she would end up getting to use her mathematical prowess for actual math -- I thought it would be cool to have a female character in the STEM field in a book set in the 1940s. However, the majority of the mathematical equations Charlie solves are metaphorical. I suppose it’s clever to have a purported math genius character use the phrase “Solve for х” when deciphering real world problems, but I was disappointed that this particular trait ended up being used in the way that it was. On the whole, Charlie’s story was just less interesting than Eve’s, and I would have been much happier not having to read it alongside the exponentially more thrilling tale of the women of the Alice Network.

Mediocre storylines aside, there was one thing in particular about the novel that I found truly appalling: the huge age gaps between the characters and their love interests. In both of their storylines, Charlie and Eve hook up with men who are significantly older than them. In 1915, 22-year-old Eve falls for the same captain who recruited for the Alice Network, and ends up sleeping with him even though he is already married and is at least in his thirties -- it is never specified exactly how old he is. Granted, Eve is 22, a fully-grown (if not a little naive) adult who can sleep with whomever she pleases, even if the age gap between them is rather inappropriate. Charlie, however, was the truly disturbing case. In 1947, Eve has a thirty-year-old Scottish man named Finn working for her, and Charlie tries to hook up with him because she has low self-esteem. However, Charlie and Finn eventually end up together at the end of the novel, and the reason I found this a little horrifying is because Charlie is consistently referred to as being underage. The novel acknowledges that at 19, Charlie is underage, and yet still she finds herself happily making out with a man 11 years older than her. It was so gross to me that these older men were attracted to, and consequently having sex with, these much younger women. I found it pretty alarming, especially due to the regularity with which Charlie is called underage. The novel literally acknowledges that her relationship with Finn is inappropriate, and yet they still end up getting married and raising Charlie’s daughter together. Perhaps I’m a little prudish when it comes to age gaps, but it feels wrong for a teenager to be hooking up with an adult. These disturbing age gaps pulled the quality of the novel down for me, to a point where I really couldn’t enjoy it anymore, knowing that I would be endorsing something I found so inappropriate.

On the whole, The Alice Network lacks the qualities that make some WWII novels so remarkable and affecting. I stand by my claim that if Eve’s story stood on its own, The Alice Network would have been close to a five star read; as it stands, however, I can only award it a three, and that’s when I’m feeling generous and not thinking about the startling similarities between Charlie St. Clair and Anastasia Steele. I do plan to read Kate Quinn’s next novel, The Huntress, as I think she does have a talent for plot; I just hope that she channels all of the Eve energy and none of the Charlie, or I’m going to regret my choice.