I have spent the last several months reading the YA fiction of an author named Deb Caletti. She is a gifted novelist, skilled with words and at painting vivid stories. But the two novels I’ve had the occasion read of hers the last few months make me seriously wonder about her perspective on the battle of the sexes.
In her most recent novel, One Great Lie, the heroine is a high school senior living a miserable life in Seattle with a family life that is misery, no friends to speak of, and an uncertain future. At her lowest moment, she learns that the novelist she worships the most is running a seminar in Venice. She has a connection to a very obscure Renaissance poet best known for her relationship with a far most famous one, and wants to learn more. She ends up part of this seminar and travels to Venice with a group of fellow students, mostly girl her own age. She learns soon enough that many of them are from similar backgrounds to her, and Bruni seems to have an interest in their talent.
Needless to say, Bruni is grooming for more than their skills. Eventually, the character ends up in a hotel room with him alone, and is nearly assaulted. She hides the truth, and then learns gradually that every woman in the seminar has been approached by her. The novelist has a history of it far beyond. Eventually, they end up exposes his history.
Things then get far worse for all of them. No criminal charges are pressed. Bruni’s publisher breaks ties with him, but another signs him up. The girls are viewed not as heroes, but whores making light of Bruni’s examples. Most become pariahs, one attempts suicide. Her own family doesn’t appreciate what she’s done. Eventually, she ends up going to Venice more to escape, and learns the true history of her ancestor and its worse than you think.
One Great Lie’s message can’t be considered either inaccurate or untimely. What I don’t understand is the purpose of the novel itself. It seems to be saying: “Men are all monsters who will exploit women, and trying to expose them only makes things worse for the women who suffer the offense. This has been the way of the world for thousands of years, and it’s never going to change.” I defy you to find one teenage girl who would read it, and not want to slit her wrists at the end of it, much less a girl who has been the subject of an incident like the ones in the novel. And One Great Lie is actually slightly optimistic in its end for its heroine; Girl, Unframed a novel which involved the troubled teenage daughter of a Hollywood starlet now in an abusive relationship ends so bleakly for its heroine, you don’t know what she can do with the rest of her life.
At one point I was going to write an article about Caletti fundamentally critiquing her message and her expression. Then earlier this month I began reading The Swallows by Lisa Lutz, and remembering Truffaut’s remark about the best way to criticize something, I decided to review Lutz’s novel instead.
To be clear, The Swallows is, if anything grimmer than Caletti’s novels: it shows a far more widespread toxic male behavior, shows that it cycles throughout the generation and actually ends with more violence and death than either of Caletti’s works here. Why then, did I not emerge from Lutz’s book with a similar urge to slit my wrists? Perhaps because the novel demonstrates something that none of Caletti’s characters are willing to do: fight back, figuratively and literally. And also because, as dark as The Swallows is, it can be really funny at times.
The Swallows is set at Stonebridge Boarding School, one of those picturesque New England Institutions that is meant to reek of class and privilege in higher education. As Gemma Russo, one of the books narrators tell us fairly early, all Stonebridge has is its looks and that all of the buildings are named for dead literary geniuses. You have less of a chance of getting into an Ivy League school than if you go somewhere similar, and most of the students will end up dropping out a community college when they graduate. The one thing Stonebridge has that all these elite schools do is a tradition – and its one of ugliness and silence.
The novel is told from the perspective of four different characters. The outsider, as there always is one, is Alex Witt. Alex doesn’t think of teaching as a calling; in fact, she doesn’t even like it that much. She ends up at Stonebridge more out of a favor from a friend of her father, and even on her first trip she has a distinct sense of foreboding about the place. Mainly because there is a residence that has the illusion of solitude, she ends up taking the job. She learns very quickly there is no such thing as solitude at Stonebridge, that there is no heat or plumbing, and halfway through the novel during a torrential rain, her lodgings flood.
Ms. Witt (as she called frequently) is as troubled as almost all of the students at Stonebridge. Her father is a best-selling novelist who has barely written one word of his novels. Her mother was an Olympic fencer from the Soviet Union whose sole purpose for marrying her father was to get out the Soviet Union. Alex spent almost all of her childhood as being a tool in her parents’ personal cold war, one that has not ended even after they divorced. Her father barely seems to care for her, save for when she helps him revise his first drafts (he is always putting the plot of his first novel in every one that he’s ever written, even though that novel was plotless). Alex walked in on his father’s assistant having sex with her (not only has her father remarried since then, but his assistant is younger than Alex) and her father is unrepentant about it. Her mother is slightly more loving, albeit in a passive aggressive way: she is constantly making her daughter exercise and never approves of the men in her life. Alex spent the months previous to this in a monastery to escape the memories of her father’s sexual activity, but couldn’t escape them. So she ends up at Stonebridge – which turns out to be out of the frying pan and into an active volcano.
At the last minute, Alex is forced to take on the creative writing course at her school. The first exercise she makes the students do is a questionnaire that they are to submit anonymously. This is an exercise more for her than anything else; she wants to figure out who her students really are without them telling her. She actually she never gets the answer she wants from any of them: “What are you capable of?” I have a feeling if she’d figured it out earlier in the novel; she’d have listened to the voices telling her to get out of Stonebridge a lot faster.
Ms. Witt sees frequent references to things to obscure terms such as ‘The Darkroom’ and ‘Dulcinea’ Some students love it; an equal number hate it. At one point, Ms. Witt goes to her classroom and spots a student breaking in. That student is Gemma Russo.
Gemma is the central character of the novel. Her parents both died in a meth lab explosion when she was young and she lived in both foster care and on the streets until the headmaster of Stonebridge; Greg Stimson put her into Stonebridge on a scholarship. Very quickly, she learned of the ugliness that went on this school. When one of the members of the elite known as The Ten saw her at an inopportune moment, he made her a member. Gemma has since become aware of the inner workings of the school, and has broken into Ms. Witt’s class because she wants to ‘recruit’ like minded members.
I now must give some plot points away. ‘Dulcinea’ refers to a contest that has been part of Stonebridge for decades. In it, the female students are more or less forced to perform oral sex on their male members of the student body and they are graded for it. (We never learn what the prize is for the winner, or if there even is one.) All of their points are measured in a private chat room known as the Darkroom, strictly run by males; express everything they think of their female companions. As one female student learns when she sees some of it, she asks: “Do they even think of us as human?”
Ms. Witt then learns why the previous head of creative writing quit at the last moment. When she tracks her down, she tells her bluntly it would be better if she didn’t learn about it: “Because now you feel you have to do something to stop it.” Teachers have become aware of the rot within the school for decades. The lucky ones just walk out. One tries to make a report, and is quickly accused of sexual activity with five members of the student body. Ms. Witt does try to go through traditional means, and runs into an entire culture that is ‘boys will be boys’. She then decides that the only way that this can be stopped is to help Gemma with her battle.
Gemma’s biggest problem is, while she is fighting a war she has no personal stake it – she wants to save Stonebridge like it saved her. She doesn’t know how deep the rot is, and by the time she does, it becomes increasingly clear that nothing can be done to save it.
There are two very different male perspectives to this. Norman Crowley, who knows all the secrets of the Darkroom because he is the man who has basically been running in for the last three years. He is tolerated but barely respected, and he hates himself. (“I’m a coward”, he says in his questionnaire even though he may be the bravest person in this novel.) The other is Finn Ford, a former student now a teacher. At one point, Norman looks at him and wonders if Finn is his future. Finn knows everything that goes on in Stonebridge and doesn’t care one bit, not even about teaching. All he cares about his getting a best-selling novel and maybe sleeping with female members of the faculty.
Now I will talk briefly about the three villains in this novel. Adam is the essential leader of The Ten, barely tolerated by his own crowd. As we learn, he barely participates in Dulcinea but when we learn his secrets, we realize he is by far the biggest monster of them all. There is Ms. Primm, ostensibly sent in to moderate the sexual complaints of the faculty, but basically there to make sure that none of the dirty laundry ever gets out. And Ms. Shephard, the librarian. Norman at one point thinks she’s the only nice person at Stonebridge. He comes to her at a horrible time in his life, and she says encouraging things to him. It is only in private that we learn that in her own way, she’s the most damaged of them all and is as ruthless and horrific the male members of the faculty. (When we learn her first name, we learn a secret that in its own way is the biggest horror show of them all.)
Now I have told you the major players in this novel and I will grow vague. What Lutz reveals throughout her book is an incredibly dim view of the males of the current generation. They use handles in the darkroom that lack any creativity and Norman revealed that he’s had to make the coding system for so much of their work ridiculous simple because they are incapable of remembering anything else. But with the exception of Norman and one other young man, they are all rotten to the core. When the females crack the codes behind Dulcinea and learn the scope of it, it leaves one of them so rattle, she chops a tree down, and soon other members of Gemma’s army are doing the same. At one point Ms. Witt asks why the contest relies so much on oral sex, and I think there’s a very simple answer: it gives the most pleasure to the male, and the woman has to do all the work. (The title for the novel is part of the code, and it is a vile pun.) When the females in the student body do learn the truth, a few of them are offended for the wrong reason: one girl joins because she has learned she’s not going to win. But eventually the girls do strike back, and their vengeance is unspeakable. (All I can say is that for them revenge is a dish best served hot.)
I learned that Lutz, in addition to her work as a novelist, was a headwriter on David Simon’s The Deuce. Like anyone who ends up spending time with Simon, I think there is a larger metaphor at work for Stonebridge. I don’t think the school is only a metaphor for toxic masculinity or sexual harassment or education, but perhaps America itself. We look good and have an overblown reputation. At its core, there is deep rot at the center of us. Those who try to expose the rot are stomped out or viewed as ‘snitches’. And it is so deeply entrenched in its body that maybe is only the next generation that can root it out. I’m not saying I agree with the methods that the girls end up using in the final section of the book, but when you see the horrors of the Darkroom, you actually think they should have done far worse.
I don’t usually reveal the endings of novels, and I’m not going to reveal how the plot resolves or how things end up for the characters in The Swallows. What I will do is reveal the last paragraph of the novel. Because it’s something that I don’t think a novelist like Caletti is capable of writing, for one, and more importantly, I think Lutz’s message is as clear a path forward, not only for women but for anyone fighting so many of the battles we do today:
“You can keep telling girls to be polite, to keep a level head, and it’ll all work out in the end. But don’t be surprised when you figure out that you’ve been feeding them lies. Don’t be alarmed when they grow tired of using their voices and playing by your rules. And don’t be shocked when they decide if they can’t win a fair fight, they’ll just have to fight dirty.”
I couldn’t agree more.
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