Title: My Little Island Life
Author: Alex Apostol
Date: 2023
Quote: "I would tell her to clear her conscience, to live a good life pursuing her passions...once she loves herself, only then will she be able to love others the right way."
With the job market tightening, with even advanced degrees no longer guaranteeing young people jobs that pay enough to support children, perhaps it's inevitable that some people want to bury their heads in the sand of the past. Why, they whine, can't young women just abort their educations when the hormones set in, marry the first man that comes along, have a bunch of babies, and they-can-always-go-back-to-school-later-if-they-survive? Wouldn't that plan at least give people my age the grandchildren some of them crave, or more realistically seem like a short-term solution to save the doomed Ponzi scheme we know as Social Security and allow us to "retire" before the crash, and really, historically, haven't a critical number of young people survived whatever messes their elders had made of society?
This book is written with Christian intentions but, between the foreword and afterword, it is not a Christian story. It's an uncompromising look at how "the problem that has no name" resurges in the life of a girl who gets married out of high school. It's the autobiographical first novel that Apostol had the good judgment to postpone publishing until she'd sold a few novels that were not about her. Kleio, a teenager with no vocation or experience or awareness of any talent, wants to get out of the Midwest so she runs off with the first boy who talks about marriage. Danny is handsome and seems like a prize because he's in a position to offer marriage at an age when other boys are not. Of course, Danny doesn't have the faintest glimmer of an idea how to be a husband. That might seem fair, or equally unfair to both sides, since Kleio doesn't have the faintest glimmer of an idea how to be a Navy wife.
It's lucky for me that Apostol keeps reminding us that Kleio is a Greek-American with a big nose, because at this stage of the novel, although the plot develops in its own different direction, I was starting to picture Kleio and Danny as one of my sisters and her husband. This story is not their story; Kleio and Danny try to have children and fail; my sister produced some of The Nephews. But it's the same sort of thing. A military wife needs to be as tough as her husband is, in her own way. Kleio, like my sister as a bride, is a teenaged princess wanting to be even more pampered than she's always been, and Danny, like my brother-in-law, knows nothing about the care and feeding of princess egos. Kleio's mother, the pessimist, predicted that theirs would be a first marriage.
The other night some people at a forum got into a discussion of the current fad for using Formerly Unprintable Words as routine expressions. How did English-speaking people ever get the idea of using the same word to mean the way babies are made and the worst fate we could wish on a person? Where the older generation used an old, shorter variant form of "condemn" that had been relegated to use specifically for God's final condemnation, we use a word that means a sexual act. Coming out of male mouths, it sounds like a threat to commit rape, and should be regarded as hatespeech. At the very least men should have to learn to expect the counter-threat, "Well snip you." Coming out of female mouths, I'm surprised it doesn't cause more men to smirk, "Is that a promise?" The only reason they don't must be that they feel that a person spewing words that are meant to be transgressive and express anger is not attractive.
Apostol shares this feeling. Danny, she says, is a sailor and talks like one. Kleio hasn't been taught to say she's turned off by Danny's ugly language, but she is. Early in the marriage Danny brays, "I married the [rude word for sex] out of her," and as the story goes on, we see, he really did. Kleio doesn't go asexual, but her marriage to Danny does. Whenever Danny manages to talk civilly, she thinks there might be hope for the marriage. When he sinks back into crass words, she despises him.
Some introverts, especially young women, can be horribly passive-aggressive. Kleio finds messages from an ex-girlfriend on Danny's phone and computer, accuses him of having cheated by continuing to see this woman while he was engaged to her, and proceeds to pay him back by sleeping with other men. She hooks up with a random man she found in the grocery store because his impudent smile made her feel attractive. She flops into bed with Danny's drunk friends, while Danny's at work, because they don't have anyone else. She lets Danny know she's having a real fling with one of his friends who is subject to military discipline for violating a buddy's marriage. She has a real crush on a younger man who is a Mormon and who seems to want romantic love more than mere sex, but he's turned off by her still living with her husband. She knows she deserves to be thrown out of his house, and perhaps wants to be, but instead Danny tries restricting her behavior, making her feel like a grounded teenager. In order to stay in his house, he says, first she can't have a job unless it's a part-time job in the nearby store, then she can't have a job at all, can't have horseback riding lessons, can't have her own car or phone, can't see the old friend from the mainland who's living near them in Hawaii...Both of them keep on punishing each other in the same way that failed them before. Neither of them seems to be learning anything. Living in "paradise" with a good income and an attractive, apparently very desirable partner, each of them appears to be miserable. Their only relief seems to be getting drunk, after which they inevitably feel even worse.
The nomadic nuclear family structure marketed in the 1950s was just a commercial version of what, in the past, was occasionally seen as a religious vocation but much more often seen as a desperate reaction to poverty or a punishment for a crime. The traditional family structure wasn't perfect, but it relieved "the problem that has no name"; both wives and husbands usually did their work from their homes, and those homes were in at least one of them's family territory, among relatives who made sure they had things to do and think about. What Danny offers Kleio is endless time to sit around the house watching television, feeling depressed, and hating Danny. And punishing him by turning his home into a peculiarly unprofitable kind of House of Ill Fame.
We don't see Kleio reclaiming her own religion (apparently she's not going to become a Mormon) in this novel. We're told that she will, because her author eventually did. What we see is how trying to be "just a housewife" stifles Kleio's unformed spirituality and all but destroys her character. As a bride she is not a mature woman who can be loved for anything beyond sex appeal, but being "just a housewife" puts her even further from becoming one.
Some women who were suffering from "the problem that has no name," as young housewives, were able to have babies. That's how emotional dysfunctions develop in the next generation. It's a very good thing that Kleio doesn't have children. When little girls who want sex to cure their low-energy moods have babies that really drain their energy, they do not magically transform into devoted mothers. And there's no longer room or employment for anyone to plan on making a career of having babies.
Christians who wish women could "just 'be keepers at home' as in Bible times" need to read this book, to grind their noses into what they're actually trying to inflict on their daughters--and on their sons. This is a first-person story but the astute reader can clearly see that Danny is, if anything, more miserable than Kleio.
What's not to like about this novel? It doesn't have room for the more pleasant side of its message. All the drinking in the novel naturally leads to the appearance of vomiting as a positive symbol, and this novel itself seems to have been written as an act of purgation, a way to put disgusting, nasty acts behind the character and her author. Toward the end of the book a character urges others, if feeling seasick, to lean over the side of the boat because "it encourages the sharks" they're out in the ocean to admire. The author's intention is clearly to let selfishness and promiscuity be recycled back into the Earth like shark bait. So let it be. But here we are at the end of a full-length novel with no room left for Kleio to start publishing the writing she's started to do, find her writing voice and her joy, reconnect with spirituality as anything beyond the urgent need for repentance and reform, become a woman who can be loved, or find a man she loves. Or a horse. Or a child. Alex Apostol has had those experiences, she tells us, but we'll have to buy another book to find them in her fiction.
I believe in love, even in romantic love. I believe in marriage. But romantic love and marriage are seldom found by picking up the first sailor that blows into town. Growing up Protestant, I didn't study the Apocrypha much, but I've always been grateful for my exposure to the teachings of Ecclesiasticus: "If thou wouldst get a friend, prove him first; and be not hasty to credit him." When the hormones have ebbed and flowed a few times, and the friendship has lasted, then it's worth thinking about acting out those hormonal feelings. Not before. Meanwhile, young women should laugh privately at our hormones and focus on becoming adults who will be fit to care for children--and disabled husbands.
It was a coincidence that while I was typing this review I had an e-friend's blog soundtrack going in the background, and it came to a song that sounded apropos...
It's worth skipping the steps of having a miserable first marriage and divorce, and just going directly through work to the Real Thing.
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