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Terri Brown-Davidson's Marie, Marie Hold on Tight...reviewed by J. Eric Miller |
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Marie, Marie Hold on Tight
Terri Brown-Davidson
Lit Pot Press, Inc.
ISBN Number: 0974391972
Reviewer: J. Eric Miller
Enter narrator Marie’s “claustrophobic world of Mother and her caresses and Dan and his belt buckles...and Alyssa Ellen's screams." Terri Brown-Davidson’s Marie, Marie: Hold on Tight is a taut, superbly told story of a young woman’s attempt to survive guilt, familial violence, and love-- or something like it. For at the heart of this debut novel is a relationship between mother and daughter in which the boundaries between caring love and carnal need have been eradicated.
The mother in question is a dangerously sensual woman who exudes “a sexy goddess glow" but cannot get enough love from others and has lost the ability to properly define the love she offers. Advising her daughter to move beyond the past and a childhood tragedy--a childhood, in fact, distinguished by tragedies--the mother is herself a stubbornly lost woman who creates imaginary worlds where she can indulge her “wanderlust" while cleaning up the spilled blood and guts at the meatpacking plant at which she works. Marie recognizes her mother’s restlessness and fears that she herself may be cursed with the same brand of greed and with the same sort of impossibility for fulfillment.
Dan is the hard drinking ex-boyfriend whose return threatens the already precariously balanced world of Marie, a young woman against whom so much damage has been done that it is hard to imagine her having survived. Yet, survive she has, with a vision of two selves, one of light and one of darkness, and a vow that she will escape her seeming destiny to “ravage and destroy", fully recover her “soul-wound," and become a new person entirely-- one who is by necessity “severed from love".
Towards this ends, she has a possible helper, Dell, Marie’s boyfriend, who, after experiencing and resisting the siren call of Marie’s mother, learns the carnal secret that bonds mother and daughter. Appalled, he reveals an alter vision of Marie, one that is clean and at ease and undamaged as a possibility for who she may become. Dell means to convince Marie that she can be saved by the art for which she has a talent and in which she can sometimes hide. As that plan falls apart, so too does Marie, realizing that “Dell's love for me can't conquer all; our life together isn't a fairy tale, because, no matter how much Dell adores me, my baby sister’s dead."
Terri Brown-Davidson has woven her novel in such a way as to center it around something of a mystery, seemingly: what happened to baby Alyssa, last seen lying broken-headed on the dining room table? The build to the chilling and surprising revelation is wonderfully paced and tenses. Offering an exploration of the thin line that separates devil from angel, love from lust, damage from aid, and guilt from innocence, Terri Brown-Davidson spins the narrative with a precision and a sort of lyrical ferocity, born out on arresting images and beautifully wrought similes.
Nodding to Carson McCullers and Flannery O’Conner, Terri Brown-Davidson creates a world where no form of innocence is safe, and even the games children play quickly darken under the influence of the corrupted. She has written Marie, Marie: Hold on Tight to read as a study on contradiction and reconciliation-- “How can we love the things that damage us?" Central to this overriding theme is the image of Mother’s hands-- hands that we see offer loving caresses to Marie, but hands that also want literally to draw Marie’s blood the first time we meet them. This novel is about the impact of parental figures, a work concerned with the possibility and the means of breaking the cycle and escaping the gravity of the damage done by the people who were supposed to care the most and protect the best. This is not a happily-ever-after affair, but a much more murky vision of what it takes to survive the “garbage and rot" of a world gone bad, a carnal world of blood and pain and hunger.
In a novel full of twists, the most surprising and pleasing is that the mystery at the heart of the work turns out to concern not really what happened to baby Alyssa, but which of the characters will be able to bear the burden of the consequence of his or her deeds, not just who will survive the damage done them, but who will survive the damage they’ve done.
It is a dark and disturbing read-- and an absolutely hypnotic one.
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