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The BookBrowse Review
The BookBrowse Review
Published February 12, 2025
ISSN: 1930-0018
The BookBrowse Review
Published February 12, 2025
ISSN: 1930-0018
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An electric contemporary reimagining of the myth of Persephone and Demeter set over the course of one summer on a lush private island, about addiction and sex, family and independence, and who holds the power in a modern underworld.
Camp counselor Cory Ansel, eighteen and aimless, afraid to face her high-strung single mother in New York, is no longer sure where home is when the father of one of her campers offers an alternative. The CEO of a Fortune 500 pharmaceutical company, Rolo Picazo is middle-aged, divorced, magnetic. He is also intoxicated by Cory. When Rolo proffers a childcare job (and an NDA), Cory quiets an internal warning and allows herself to be ferried to his private island. Plied with luxury and opiates manufactured by his company, she continues to tell herself she's in charge. Her mother, Emer, head of a teetering agricultural NGO, senses otherwise. With her daughter seemingly vanished, Emer crosses land and sea to heed a cry for help she alone is convinced she hears.
Alternating between the two women's perspectives, Rachel Lyon's Fruit of the Dead incorporates its mythic inspiration with a light touch and devastating precision. The result is a tale that explores love, control, obliteration, and America's own late capitalist mythos. Lyon's reinvention of Persephone and Demeter's story makes for a haunting and ecstatic novel that vibrates with lush abandon. Readers will not soon forget it.
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In Rachel Lyon's Fruit of the Dead, Cory Ansel, a directionless high school graduate, has had all her college applications rejected. After spending the summer working as a camp counselor, she is loath to return to the New York City home she shares with her mother Emer, an ambitious career-oriented woman whose energy Cory has no interest in matching. So instead, she lets herself be picked up by Rolo Picazo, the pharmaceutical CEO father of a camper, and swept away to a private island. Her meeting Rolo and their subsequent trip to a nearby diner are rendered in luscious, sensual prose that pulls the reader into the mind of a wayward teenager whose intentions can be swayed as much by a sugar high as an opportunity to luxuriate in nothingness, which is what seems to be on offer.
Rolo suggests that he will pay her to nanny his two children, Spenser and Fern, but the tension between him and Cory is at least somewhat sexual, a fact made uncomfortable not only by their age gap but because she seems to view him as a curious kind of father figure, his spendthrift behavior and lack of moral concern a foil to her mother's performative social consciousness. Cory amuses Rolo and the children in the diner by reciting the artificial ingredients in various foods Emer would disapprove of before she begins to feel sick from gorging on them and has to run to the restroom to throw up.
Fruit of the Dead alternates between Cory's third-person perspective and her mother's first-person monologue. Emer's chapters, full of parental concern over her daughter's disappearance, remind us that Cory may be in danger, probably in the grasp of a predator. However, the narrative format also helps us see what Cory is running from, and adds to the discomfiting sense that she is being watched, that her life is not fully hers but must always be filtered through another's point of view. While Emer is certainly more sympathetic, and safer than Rolo, she is in her own way a self-centered, larger-than-life figure. A project she has spearheaded for the agricultural NGO where she works has taken a nosedive, failing not only her organization but the Chinese farmers it contracted who were counting on being able to use the harvest of a new "magic rice" (which, it turns out, doesn't grow) to feed their families: "How did anyone think it was a good idea to try to streamline, optimize, expand, and improve on rice, of all things—in this part of the world, of all places." That Emer is aware of her "colonialist wrongheadedness" doesn't change her persistence along this path.
Considering how much time we spend with Emer, the combination of her self-effacement and sanctimonious attitude could become grating, but Lyon's exquisite, deft language, endlessly clever but never just for cleverness's sake, carries the character in her desperation. One passage, for example, when Emer is stymied in her attempts to reach Rolo, drops what could be a playful Lolita reference, draws attention to her hypocrisy and classism, and still summons an emotional reaction in the reader as we see her on the verge of breaking: "I will not be handled. I must speak to Rolo Picazo! Ro. Lo. Pic. Ah. Zo. I'll call my lawyer. Say: I'm not some vagrant, Phil. You don't know who I am. I am Emer Ansel—" Also, as Fruit of the Dead is a retelling of Greek mythology — the story of the harvest goddess Demeter, whose daughter Persephone is kidnapped by the god of the underworld, Hades (see Beyond the Book) — Emer's qualities serve a purpose. Rolo and Emer are markedly different in their relationships to Cory, but flipsides of the same capitalist coin, effectively both deities of the modern world, beings who control the lives of others. They are full of themselves and out of touch, lonely in ways they refuse to grapple with, sad in the face of innocence and youth.
In Cory's chapters, Lyon's intoxicating prose springs out of the altered states of consciousness her heroine seeks — from a joint shared with her co-workers at the camp, from various forms of alcohol, and, finally, from an opioid-like, ruby-colored pill called Granadone, which is manufactured by Rolo's company and has come under legal scrutiny, and which he mixes into a cocktail he calls Fruit of the Dead. It would be easy to view Cory as an ungrateful youth squandering her privilege, but her apathy and craving of oblivion appear to be, if only unconsciously, driven by a desire for simplicity. Under the influence of Rolo's "grannies," she opts out of responsibility but becomes fascinated by everyday wonders she otherwise seems at a loss for how to explore. At one point, she has a moment of clarity while caring for a small succulent, thinking that she shares a fundamental bond with Emer through this sudden affinity for botany, but one has the sense that her mother lost any such passion of her own long ago.
Because we know how the story ends, or think we do, the question of what will happen isn't the main draw — the action and telling are. Lyon's novel, if thoroughly drenched in the contemporary world, isn't just modern décor filling the set piece of the original myth, either, but echoes the roiling energy of the Homeric poem. The conclusion, too, hews close to the source, but casts a long light back over the journeys Cory and Emer have taken, inviting us to look again and question what we have seen.
Reviewed by Elisabeth Cook
Rachel Lyon's novel Fruit of the Dead is based on the story of Demeter and Persephone from Greek mythology. In the original story, Demeter, goddess of the harvest, is devastated when her daughter Persephone is kidnapped by Hades, god of the underworld, who intends to make her his wife. Demeter's grief is so great that it affects the growth of crops and plants in nature. She appeals to the god Zeus, who asks Hades to let Persephone go. Hades agrees to this on the condition that Persephone hasn't eaten any of the food he has given her, but Persephone has (wouldn't you know it) eaten seeds from a pomegranate. As a compromise, Zeus and Hades decide that she will stay in the underworld for one-third of the year, and that she can return to Earth for the remaining two-thirds. And so for the part of the year Persephone is gone, Demeter's sadness at her daughter's absence causes plants and crops to stop growing, while during the rest of the year, they flourish.
The story is told in a 495-line poem by Homer, from which Lyon's novel pulls quotes (of the English translation from Hugh G. Evelyn-White) for the wonderfully dramatic titles of chapters that alternate between the points of view of her modern Demeter-Persephone pair: Emer, who works for an agricultural NGO, and Cory, a shiftless high-school grad. Cory shares her mother's interest in nature, but in her quest for pleasure and oblivion, she slips and falls into the clutches of a predator, a pharmaceutical CEO named Rolo, who serves as a stand-in for Hades. Choice examples of Emer's chapter names include "I Sped, Like a Wild-Bird, Over Firm Land and Yielding Sea" and "Disfigured by Grief Terrible and Savage, I Sat Near the Wayside Like an Ancient Woman," while Cory's perspective is preceded by gems such as "And She Yet Beheld Earth and Starry Heaven, and the Strong-Flowing Sea Where Fishes Shoal, and Still Hoped to See Her Mother."
Lyon drops numerous references to the original myth in her novel, like a diner named Pluto — downgraded dwarf planet and Hades' Roman counterpart. Cory is lured into Rolo's grasp and held in his power by a drug his company manufactures in the form of a ruby-red pill called Granadone. Rolo even uses it in a cocktail dubbed Fruit of the Dead that nods to Persephone's delicious downfall: "Vodka, soda, bitters, a splash of pomegranate juice, a slice of lime. Tasty—kind of plummy—and so potent you felt like you'd transcended this earthly sphere."
Lyon's retelling highlights a balance between death and life, showing both the self-destruction and strange wisdom that can emerge in altered and slowed-down states, possibly suggesting that a kind of demise is necessary to add a sense of purpose to one's existence. But it also brings a modern and environmental sensibility to the myth, focusing on the way the earth's resources are captured and manipulated by controlling forces — big pharma, large-scale agriculture — who seek power equivalent to that of gods.
"The Rape of Proserpina" by Gian Lorenzo Bernini (circa 1621), photographed by Alvesgaspar CC BY-SA 4.0
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