{"id":64579,"date":"2023-01-02T07:00:00","date_gmt":"2023-01-02T12:00:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.themainemag.com\/?p=64579"},"modified":"2023-01-10T09:24:07","modified_gmt":"2023-01-10T14:24:07","slug":"lungfish-and-the-alienating-act-of-addiction","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.themainemag.com\/lungfish-and-the-alienating-act-of-addiction\/","title":{"rendered":"\u201cLungfish\u201d and the Alienating Act of Addiction"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

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Meghan Gilliss\u2019s Lungfish<\/em>, out this past fall from Catapult Books and longlisted for the Center for Fiction\u2019s 2022 First Novel Prize, is that rare novel of stunning, viscerally alive sentences with an equally propulsive plot. It tells the story of Tuck, who moves with her family from Pittsburgh to a small fictional island off the coast of Maine where her grandmother died. Technically squatting\u2014as the island has been passed on to Tuck\u2019s currently unreachable itinerant father\u2014Tuck and her family are grappling with the dueling ticking clocks of the season (the house where they are staying isn\u2019t winterized) and their lack of legal rights to the property. Add to that the caretaking of their two-year-old daughter, Agnes, and Tuck\u2019s careful, complicated relationship with her husband Paul\u2019s newly disclosed substance abuse, and the book is rife with tension from the start.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

At the time of the book\u2019s writing, Gilliss was, like Tuck, trying to care for and love someone struggling with addiction. \u201cA terrible experience,\u201d she says. \u201cBut not uninteresting.\u201d It was a position she found both hard and alienating to explain to those not in the throes of it. \u201cHere was a way of trying,\u201d she says of writing Lungfish<\/em>. \u201cNot to tell any particular person\u2019s story, but to say: Here\u2019s a version, here\u2019s some of what it feels like.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Early in the book Tuck says, \u201cWhat\u2019s new, now, is everything I didn\u2019t see. My life behind the curtain.\u201d And she is not wrong. In addition to her husband\u2019s struggles, there are truths about Tuck\u2019s life that we, the reader, spend the book trying to see and understand. \u201cIt was important to me that we never come to any feeling that Tuck has seen everything rightly,\u201d says Gilliss. \u201cThere is still much that\u2019s obscured to her, and I think always will be\u2014particularly around her husband\u2019s relationship to drugs. And that was the trickiest part of writing this book\u2014allowing the reader to inhabit Tuck\u2019s own state of unknowingness, but to show them enough to make whatever interpretations they<\/em> need to make in order to have the footing needed to continue reading.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The reader\u2019s footing comes from every new jump and scene being formed with quick elegance. Gilliss describes the natural world, the physical sensations of living on this island, with bristling, penetrating force: \u201cThe bulbous capsules at the fringe of seaweed pop between her teeth as her mouth accepts the slimy brine.\u201d And later: \u201cIt was dusk, and she led me by the hand deep into the ferns, to show me where the spring bubbled up into a little marsh, the frog eggs attached to the underbellies of wide blades of pale grass.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

But, true to Gilliss\u2019s intentions, the book\u2019s emotional investments\u2014its sense of knowing and not knowing\u2014remain slippery. Moving in short sections, the chapters\u2014sometimes a single paragraph, sometimes a sentence\u2014are named with oblique words like \u201cSlough\u201d and \u201cFade,\u201d and \u201cCatch.\u201d These titles don\u2019t attempt to explain or answer any questions, but to show a specific type of yearning. They ask the reader to inhabit the liminal and the uncertain.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Gilliss goes on, \u201cThe novel began by archiving emotional states that struck me as the kind my own brain would forget or wipe away once they were past; the kinds that felt too slippery to hold onto.\u201d She also had a young child while the book was being written and felt powerless in many parts of her life. The book was a way of acting, of doing. \u201cIt was a form of exerting control. There was word choice, at least.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

This control is evident not only in the language, but in the way the book keeps our attention focused explicitly on Tuck. \u201cI watch him sleeping in the bed next to me,\u201d Tuck says. \u201cFeel tender, I think. Feel tender, feel tender, feel tender.<\/em>\u201d She is conflicted, desperate, trying to keep their child fed and alive, trying to trust and love Paul while remaining vigilant enough to keep her whole family safe. But Paul, for us, as he does also for Tuck, remains largely an absence, unknowable and enigmatic. This is not a story of addiction where our main investment is with the person struggling with a substance, but of trying to still love and be loved, to retain a sense of being tender, in the wake of addiction\u2019s effects.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

As Gilliss wrote the novel, \u201cFor five or seven or thirty minutes in the early morning, on the days I was able to sneak downstairs without waking my daughter,\u201d she says, the book began \u201cto burn\u201d in her. \u201cI wrote on scraps of paper at work.\u201d She began to think about it constantly. This urgency, the small snips of time and the compulsion, is evident. Tuck is traveling back and forth from the island to find money, to try to locate her father, get food and propane, find her family a more permanent place to stay. The sentences throughout are elegant, but also shot through with desperation. They convey a feeling that, if the next choice isn\u2019t made, the next resource unearthed, her whole world will fall apart.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

One of the main tensions of the book, and one of its great successes, is Tuck\u2019s seeming passivity, her deep interiority, her desire not to act even as circumstances demand she does. \u201cHer habits may not help her handle the problem in a traditional, recommended, take-the-bull-by-the-horns kind of way, but she gets there, arguably,\u201d says Gilliss. \u201cUltimately, she exercises extreme agency. She figures out a problem in her own way.\u201d Books are often built on action, interaction, reaction, but Gilliss is able to craft a compelling, ultimately capable character while allowing her to stay fully and complicatedly herself.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

We, like Tuck, end the book with few answers and very little certainty. In the last paragraph, here is Tuck, speaking of her daughter: \u201cSeeing is not the same as making. I can\u2019t make her; can only show her how it\u2019s done.\u201d Lungfish<\/em> too shows us something, gives us immediate and visceral access to a certain type of yearning and of loving, and in so doing gets us closer, without ever being presumptuous enough to think that we could fully touch it, to the weight and texture, the elemental, desperate nature, of Tuck\u2019s specific ache.<\/p>\n\n\n\t\t

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