In her latest novel, This Rescue Thing, Penny Allen offers a vivid tale that many literary theorists would call “autofiction,” or a fictionalized autobiography. And this amazing “rescue thing,” full of dramatic intensity and carried out by the narrator, was inspired by certain events of the author’s life in the mid-1990s. It is during this time that the narrator willingly leaves her troubled job in Paris for Thailand to answer a call for help from an old friend she knew back in Portland, Oregon, a unique character who had always fascinated her, and is now entangled in a mixture of mental delusion, crime and bad company that has sent her to a madhouse in the jungle.
The narrator’s description of Sansan as a storyteller—not a scholar, but rather, a creator of historically relevant imaginative fiction—fully applies to the writer’s talent. Allen, like her character, Sansan, inhabits her story. The author creates a sense of urgency, and the narrator’s craving for adventure makes the tale not only a travel story and a thriller, but a plunge into a metaphysical dimension. The book is not just the story of Sansan’s rescue, but the story of the narrator’s rescue from herself.
What seemed, at first, to be a sharp contrast between the rescuer and the rescued turns out to reveal some similarity between the two: both of them are outsiders with the same need for protection, same sense of aloneness and same feeling of alienation from fellow Americans—a common theme in American literature, reminiscent of Henry Miller’s urge to live far from “the air-conditioned nightmare.”
The narrator’s need to break free from a puritanical background is expressed through her work ethic, worries about money, the future and how she envies those who appear free of constraint. Her longing for brashness gives her venture into the unknown a psychoanalytical dimension, for the story hints at how hard it can be to cope with one’s desires (especially if suppressed). A sexual motif permeates the book and expresses an underlying quest for femininity and a break from the proverbial mother. Sansan finds herself better off without a mother and the narrator also confesses that her most primitive sensations have been experienced with her father, not her mother. What is striking is the sensitivity and sensuousness (e.g., the animal-like bond between Thai mothers and sons) that radiates throughout the book with its overwhelming sense of smell (vomit, frangipani, the durian fruit…to name a few).
Via Sansan’s rescue, the reader is immersed in the narrator’s ordeal: she begins to flirt with danger, is thrown off balance, experiences doubt, grapples with the question of right and wrong. Despite the narrator’s compelling sense of morality (she insists she has never bolted from commitments, from jobs or assignments and is obsessed with doing the right thing), the narrator knows that life cannot be seen in terms of “the good guys” and “the bad guys.” Case in point, a man like Dr. Renard, who she meets in a bar, can commit himself to saving lives and still associate with prostitutes. Sex can have positive and negative connotations (fear and radiant energy); Thailand can be violent and gentle at the same time; her feelings for Sansan can be filled with both love and resentment; the scenery can consist of beauty and trash; flowers can have the most beautiful fragrance or the worst rotten smells like the flowers of evil. During her fraught odyssey, the narrator discovers a world that is not just black and white, making it her initiation journey. She learns something about ambivalence, thus gaining wisdom.
When the narrator is back in Paris, she lectures the “goddess” on the telephone. She is now far less impressed by her. She tells Sansan there will be no more tricky situations, okay? Sansan says yes, but “unconvincingly,” which could be indicative either of Sansan’s unwillingness to change or perhaps the narrator’s own doubt of her friend. At the very end of the novel, ambivalence hangs in the air. The narrator has given up her feelings of inferiority with regard to “the goddess,” but not her moral compass as she still finds difficulty with the French amoral sense of irony (“the wordplay, the fronting off, the aphorisms, the insults, the snide demeanor”). For The French reader, perhaps the gap between the American psyche and the French second-degree thinking remains unbridgeable.
Even so, Allen has created the kind of tension and depth that allows the reader to engage with the complexities of human emotions, which is precisely what good literature should be about.
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