BookBrowse Reviews Fruit of the Dead by Rachel Lyon

BookBrowse:

An exuberant retelling of the Demeter and Persephone myth that takes a sympathetic view of early adult malaise.

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.

This review first ran in the April 17, 2024 issue of BookBrowse Recommends.