What makes Tatiana Ryckman's The Ancestry of Objects more than a familiar story of an adulterous love affair are the troubling circumstances of the unnamed narrator who finds herself involved in the affair and the extraordinary language she uses in relating it. Although the narrator isn't exactly expansive in providing us the details about her circumstances, we do gradually learn that she never knew her parents, raised instead by austerely religious grandparents, that those grandparents have died, that she has just lost her job, and that she is currently suicidal. She is in fact quite blunt about that--when she meets at a bar the man who will be her lover, she is contemplating the means of her death: electrocution, asphyxiation, or pills?
We also learn immediately that, although we are reading an ostensibly first-person narrative, the narrator refers to herself in the plural first person.
When he sits at the bar, waiting for his table, and his woman, we see from the corner of our eye that he will speak to us, and when he asks what we are reading we resent him for kicking the crutch of loneliness out from under us like the job, gone, and one day the house, gone, and soon, life, gone. Us, gone.
It would seem we are not to take this eccentricity as a sign of a literal dissociative disorder--indeed, throughout the novel the narrator's identity seems quite consistent--but nevertheless as an expression of her psychological confusion. Whether because of the lingering effects of her quasi-abusive upbringing, the reality of her solitude (living in the same house in which she was raised), or simply a depressive personality (likely a combination of these, although the first surely has conditioned the last), the narrator/protagonist does have a faltering sense of her own self-worth, and her affair with "the man" seems simultaneously to be an invitation to obliterate her self-respect altogether and an opportunity to take the first tentative steps, at least, toward claiming it.
But while the narrator seems to subsist in a state of emotional and psychological drift, her powers of observation and recall are extraordinarily keen, her verbal resources abundant. In the midst of a conversation with the man (who does have a name: David) in which the narrator tells him what she knows about her parents, supposedly dead in a car accident, she begins to feel the presence of the grandparents:
The house takes in these new unnamed faults, filling the cracks between poorly fitted pieces of counter and narrow passageways behind furniture that cannot be pressed flush against the wall, the voices of our grandparents behind closed doors, whispering to each other while we choke our breath in the deep, soft mattress of our mother's old room. We make an island in the sea of tiles and listen for their holy guidance in the emptiness we've always moved through. Nothing is right for a young woman to do/say/think/be.
This language is not especially figurative (except for the personification in the first sentence that triggers the recollection of the grandparents), but it nevertheless provides revelatory insight into the narrator's circumstances, the way her house seems to her alive, still animated by the presence of her grandparents, even if she can now only access that presence through memory and the articulation of that memory in scrupulously articulated but slightly aslant language. Often we get isolated bursts of such verbal acuity: "When he straightens, our hands drop to our sides as if they'd expected to be left empty all along," the narrator tells us after a first embrace with David.
Because of the atmosphere of impending failure the narrator's chronicle of her liaison with David also creates through her relentless self-examination and painstaking descriptions, the reader is perhaps tempted to move swiftly through her account to get a confirmation of that failure. But a full appreciation of the novel's achievement requires that we slow down and parse her sentences, allow their evocative indirection to register fully. The protagonist of The Ancestry of Objects is ultimately a memorable and somewhat enigmatic character, but this impression comes not simply from the extremity of her situation but in the way as narrator she finds the language to express her experience of extremity, managing to illuminate it rather than capitulate to it.
Arguably the novel falters at its conclusion. As the affair with David comes to its (inevitable) end, the narrator makes a fresh connection with her absent mother (through a shoebox full of objects that had belonged to her, found in the grandparents' bedroom) and begins to move all of the household objects associated with the grandparents into the basement, ultimately leaving the house essentially bare. The symbolism of all of this is pretty obvious, and the suggestion that the narrator may be on the verge of beneficial change seems rather pat. But to an extent, this is the expected ending to this sort of narrative, and the plot isn't really the point in The Ancestry of Objects. We don't learn anything new about the geometry of a love affair, but we can come to appreciate the author's way with words.
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