Sunday Morning! “New Animal” by Ella Baxter

I’ve been spending the last month and a half traveling the United States, visiting my parents and relatives, and I’ve uncovered a terrible deception that has been perpetuated: someone has clearly disguised them as old people! Through some Rick Baker level of prosthetic wizardry, my father has been made to look balding and splotchy with skin cancers, considerably heavier, his eyelids hanging like canopies over his crossed-eyes. With my mother, it’s mostly stippling and wrinkles enhanced by a performance of ceaseless panic, a growing conviction that venturing anywhere beyond her quiet suburb is “taking your life in your hands.” Even more disconcerting is my parents’ claim that someone has done some of the same things to disguise me!

The thing no one tells you is when you’re young is you’ll never know when you become old, nor have any say in the matter. In your mind, everything is much the same as it was when you were 18 years old, but your body is busy quietly mutineering against you. Bodies do that; like a poorly-trained pet, they’re insubordinate and willful and messy. The “mind-body problem” is more like a mismatched marriage or lousy roomate. From the mind’s perspective, the body is a real pain in the… well, somewhere corporeal!

Even worse, the body is a short-term dwelling, a temporary address. My parents drive me crazy, but I still wish they would live forever. That’s the truth of it. I wish I would too. We’d probably be better off without bodies all told. And it occurs to me that we’re pushing a lot closer to actual disembodiment in the digital age, becoming the detached heroes of our own ghost story.

There’s an interesting dynamic to Amelia, the main character of Ella Baxter’s novel New Animal (which is being released next week in North America from Two-Dollar Radio): she’s disembodied- her mind is quite detached from her body, yet her life is spent engaging with the messier facts of other people’s bodies. When we meet her, she’s working as a cosmetic mortician in her family’s funeral parlor, handling dead bodies all day, and spending her evenings having casual sex with men she’s met through dating apps. She’s up to her neck in sex and death, but it’s all kept at a remove. She controls the situations and some aspect of these interactions never touches her. And as a character, Amelia’s engaging and funny in that way bodies can be messy and funny- minds too, for that matter. But, we sense there’s something deeper to all this; a previous lover once took his own life by leaping from a cliff. It seems as if something was dashed out of Amelia too.

And then something happens to a body that Amelia can’t control: her mother has a fall and dies unexpectedly, throwing her out into the deep waters of grief. This is something she can’t keep at a distance; so, she skips the funeral, flees to Tasmania and her biological father, and throws herself into the local BDSM scene, seemingly in hopes of being shocked into feeling something else, a different kind of pain than the sort she is awash in at the moment. Grief is like a tidal wave; as I’ve found in my own life, the issue with it is it’s very clear when grief begins, but a real mystery when it will ever end. With spankings and whippings and kink, there are safe words. We have no safe words to release us from emotional pain.

In terms of therapy, go with whatever works.

Because she’s stumbling and flailing in her own life, Amelia has all sorts of misadventures in the world of S&M, which are as cringe-inducing as they are messy. In my (limited) experience, the kink scene is as structured and mannerly a world as the royal court, while grief is completely chaotic; mashing the two millieus together is rife for trouble. Amelia is inappropriately abused by one toxic dom and she later pees on an unwilling sub (a faux pas in most social situations, to be fair) and stumbles through this subculture with wide eyes like she was Alice in Leatherland. It’s not clear how well the awkward comedy of these scenes might go over with those fetish communities that aren’t exactly noted for their sense of humor. But I appreciated that this character is fumbling like the rest of us, as much a hero as a villian in her own story. Sex and death are physical realities that disorient and discombobulate us all.

I also greatly appreciated that Baxter avoided giving us the sort of easy answers or a tidy resolution that are tempting in one’s debut novel. Thank goodness Amelia doesn’t fall in love with a masterful dom in a penthouse, or get saved from her grief by learning how to swing a whip. She’s kind of an oddball and her family members are as weird as mine. The story reaches a final scene of catharsis that is unexpectedly beautiful and transcendent, but it is as unforeseen and incomplete and fractured as emotional life itself. We’re not left with the feeling that her story is over or that she’s reached some sort of “closure,” which I could see frustrating readers looking for a neat three-act story arc, but it struck me as authentic and heartbreaking. Amelia never fully masters her body, or her soul, but they reach a detente, which is the best one can hope for. “Closure” is such bullshit anyway.

Instead, we’re just stuck in these akward, sometimes repulsive and embarrassing bodies until the very moment we’re not; there’s your closure! In our art and our lives, it’s better to live with the messiness in the meantime.

And so, what are YOU reading, watching, pondering, playing, creating, or mastering this weekend?

Endnote: I’ve been keeping a sketchbook/journal during the trip. Some of this post is a riff on this entry: