Mermaids Resurfacing: Chloe Aridjis’s SEA MONSTERS
by Caroline Coleman
Shortly before I started reading my favorite novel of 2019, my beautiful 23 year old daughter stopped communicating with me. I didn’t know it then, but it would be almost a year before I saw her again. She didn’t literally run away; she was busy and happy at college. But she might as well have.
Chloe Aridjis
Sea Monsters, by Chloe Aridjis, a New York City-born Mexican American writer who grew up in the Netherlands and Mexico, received glowing reviews including in The New Yorker, the Guardian, the Atlantic, and the LA Review of Books. This short, dreamlike novel tells the chronicle of Luisa, a seventeen year old girl on track for Oxford who runs away from Mexico City, and parents she describes as “kind.” She takes a bus to a beach town in Mexico with an archetypal bad boy. She leaves no note. The novel progresses without the parents, but their pain hovers over the narrative. Luisa and the bad boy quickly part ways. And to my shock, Luisa lingers. She sleeps alone in a hammock in a palapa, wanders around a town she describes as a “meeting place for fabulists,” and observes a new love interest she calls the merman. So the long line of tension of this novel is not will she end up with the bad boy, but rather: why did she run away?
I, too, was a girl from a kind family who nevertheless ran away—just once, and only for a few minutes, when I was ten. I recall crouching in the dark a few streets from home, waiting to be found, longing to be missed, wishing to be appreciated. Within minutes it seemed like the dark was growing darker. It felt thicker, more menacing. It seemed to have texture, a presence—and I sprinted home long before anyone had even noticed I’d left. There was an indignity to my return and a shame in recognizing my insecurity, so sharp that I can recall the sting of it even now. And so I loved this novel in large part because it let me enjoy doing something I never fully let myself do.
I loved it, too, because each sentence captures so vividly the instability of its particular place and time: Mexico City in the 1980s. Some buildings are under construction. Others are falling apart. When an event in Mexico “challenged the natural order of things,” Luisa and her parents call it “thermal inversion”: such as when “a politician stole millions and the government covered it up”; “an infamous drug trafficker escaped from a high-security prison”; or “the director of a zoo turned out to be a dealer in wild animal skins and two lion cubs went missing.” Mexico City is full of smog—esmog—but the “government did nothing.” Migratory birds “dropped dead from the sky—exhaustion, the officials had said, they died of exhaustion, but everyone knew the poisoned air had cut their journeys short, lead in the form of dispersed molecules rather than compacted into a bullet.” The language of the novel captures what happens when you live in a country where the leadership has a broken relationship with the truth: language, concepts, nature and architecture break down faster than anyone can prop them up.
In addition to capturing the political situation (topical, perhaps, for contemporary Americans), each sentence also seems to encompass adolescence. Always there’s a staying and a leaving; a clinging to childhood and a soaring toward adulthood; a pushing parents away then holding them close. Luisa says of her adopted beach town, for instance, that “the sun seared the sand, and the heat particles, free to roam where they pleased, dissipated in the air.” One element of the sun stays; the others evaporate. That almost every sentence is like this lends to Aridjis’ prose a Lauren Groff-esque quality. Playing with perception, she tells us that “night doesn’t fall, it rises.” She watches waders disappear “into the waves until they became nothing but torsos, torsos afloat on the surface of the sea.” Luisa’s first sighting of the merman is distorted: “I could tell the man had a handsome foreign face, at least through my sunglasses, at least from a distance,” and when he doesn’t notice her, she concludes, “All I could do was throw myself into his line of vision.” The merman intrigues her because he’s building a sandcastle, but she’s horrified when the sandcastle collapses: “the fine engineering work was erased within seconds,” because the merman “tripped over his shovel and fell into the castle.” Like the castle, like adolescence, each sentence holds in its palm two halves of an Ecclesiastical coin, both a time to build and a time to destroy.
I’d forgotten what that time of life was like. The prose took me back to my own long-buried adolescence, a time of frizzy hair, big braces, and bigger glasses; a time of mortifying crushes on every boy who ignored me. But even more than the plot, the politics, and the prose, I think I loved this book because it spoke to my own personal heartbreak. It’s been said that we don’t read great works of art; they read us. Nor do they read us in a static way; rather, as we evolve, over time they see different qualities in us.
A month ago, Christmas came, and with it my daughter. She stayed with us for three nights. She caught me up on the events of the past year. We watched a holiday movie and she put her head on my shoulder. She didn’t bring up our year apart. Neither did I.
We live in a world of broken relationships. For every wanderer, there’s a heartbroken seeker. A beautifully written novel that captures the rising and falling of the wanderer’s heart strikes me as something to hold onto. The great secret of Sea Monsters is that while Luisa is looking for magic and finding disillusionment, her parents are looking for her. The novel holds out the hope that every parent of a young adult child needs: even drowned mermaids resurface.
—
Caroline Coleman is the author of Loving Soren (B&H 2005). Her short fiction has been published in Ms. Magazine online.
