This week's novel is Mermaids in Paradise by Lydia Millet.
Deb, our caustic and opinionated narrator, and her new husband Chip, who is friendly like a golden retriever, go on honeymoon to an island in the British Virgin Islands. There Chip makes friends with a parrot fish expert, who discovers mermaids near the reef by their resort. This begins a power struggle between the resort and Chip's group of do-gooders over the fate of the mermaids.
The mermaids don't show up until page 80, and the whole first section (60 pages or so) is Deb's commentary on the people in her life and how bizarre it is to plan a wedding. I loved it. Deb is a pretty terrible person, rolling her eyes at Chip's outgoingness, his interest in extreme physical challenges, and his interest in video games, to the point where you wonder why they're getting married. She introduces people into the narrative with epithets ("The Freudian" "The Heartlanders" and "The Old Salt") and it makes complete sense until they're still around twenty pages later and she admits they have names, and you realize "oh. She hadn't to learn those." But it works so well, because it seems like they're just going to pass in and out of her life, and when they don't and need a name it's outright jarring. And that's how it works: somehow, even though she's awful, I ended up completely on board, not agreeing with her but still finding her thoughts entertaining.
Once they get to the resort, the prose lost some of its magic for me, which is weird because that's when mythical creatures show up. I think this happens because not only does Chip's team not have any ideas as to how to protect the mermaids, but Deb doesn't know what she's doing either and ends up the least useful person on the team, essentially running their mermaid-protection twitter account while everyone else sneaks aboard the resort's ships and makes internationally televised TV spots. While Deb was in control in the first part (even if she was controlling how little she cared about things her friends did), she struggles with being powerless once they get to the resort. And that's on top of the mermaid-protection group never having a firm goal in mind.
And then there's the ending, which did not work for me. I'm not talking about the climax, which I liked. I'm talking about the last page of the book where there's a twist, but I wouldn't even call it a twist, because that implies that it took what was already present in the narrative and turned it in an unexpected way. This just added a completely random thing on the last page. It did not work to shed new light on what I'd already read or make me want to read it again with that knowledge to see all the little hints. While it did make some things make slightly more sense (why Deb and Chip get married, except by the end I got them as a couple; or why The Freudian seemed to give up his practice and marry one of his clients and why the client is so terrified all the time; or why the mermaid-protesters use a very specific phrase to describe the mermaids) it still doesn't seem like enough, and those didn't feel like mysteries I really cared about. Furthermore, it undercut some of the themes that crop up at the end of the novel--preserving the reef, protecting the mermaids. And then it drags up the question of, "okay. So then why do I care about ANY of this? Why did any of these people put this much energy into protecting or exploiting or protesting the mermaids? Don't they have better things to do?" Deb explains on the last page, that she's just ignoring this twist and moving along with her life like it's not there. And it makes sense that Deb would compartmentalize like this. But it doesn't make sense that everyone is doing that, and since there's no mention of it earlier (and you'd think it would have come up) that seems to be what's happening.
It was a frustrating last page.
***
Next week: Into the Dim, YA time travel by Janet Taylor
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