{"id":10574,"date":"2013-12-16T01:30:08","date_gmt":"2013-12-16T05:30:08","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/mookseandgripes.com\/reviews\/?p=10574"},"modified":"2013-12-20T13:55:40","modified_gmt":"2013-12-20T17:55:40","slug":"rebecca-curtis-the-christmas-miracle","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/mookseandgripes.com\/reviews\/2013\/12\/16\/rebecca-curtis-the-christmas-miracle\/","title":{"rendered":"Rebecca Curtis: “The Christmas Miracle”"},"content":{"rendered":"

Click here<\/a> to read the abstract of the story on The New Yorker<\/em>\u00a0webpage (this week\u2019s story is available only for subscribers). Rebecca Curtis\u2019s \u201cThe Christmas Miracle\u201d was originally published in the December 23 & 30, 2013 issue of The New Yorker<\/em>.<\/p>\n

\"Click<\/a>

Click for a larger image.<\/p><\/div>\n

Betsy<\/strong><\/p>\n

\u201cThe Christmas Miracle,\u201d by Rebecca Curtis, is not for the squeamish. She says as much to K, to whom the story is addressed as a letter.\u00a0This long story involves, among other things, thousands of silverfish in the trash compactor and animal eyeballs rolling around on the floor.\u00a0What does this have to do with Christmas, you say?<\/p>\n

That is the problem. The disjunct between the title and the first page creates so much vertigo I could hardly get through it.\u00a0Regardless of faith, the reader assumes that a charming fable of selfless love will follow, perhaps\u00a0\u00e0 la O. Henry, perhaps\u00a0\u00e0 la Miracle on 34th Street<\/em>, but the story that does follow is everything but charming.<\/p>\n

Instead, it is hallucinatory, wild, confused, and garbled, and in parts, it is revolting. This appears to be Curtis\u2019s\u00a0intent, and I found it difficult to take. The seriousness of her subject, however, may justify her means.<\/p>\n

The opening line is \u201cCats were dying.\u201d Aunt D, the narrator, lurches crazily from concern for her sister\u2019s five cats, to her own failed life, to an obsession she has with her three tick-borne diseases, to a conviction her hunger is due to the Bartonella bacteria.\u00a0She details her sister\u2019s annual Christmas party, something that involves eight pecan pies, forty dozen home-made cookies, and a gingerbread mansion.\u00a0She tells how the family is trying to save their cats from the coyotes that have recently arrived in the neighborhood.\u00a0She abruptly reveals two secrets: an in-law is failing to get pregnant, and the pater-familias is a pedophile.\u00a0Aunt D herself had discovered him the Christmas before in a dark, empty room, \u201crubbing the butt\u201d of the seven year old niece.\u00a0This terrible revelation is followed almost immediately by the loony claim:<\/p>\n

\u00a0Everybody in our family meant well and wanted to be a family.<\/span><\/p><\/blockquote>\n

What?! Wait a minute! Wait just a minute! Hold the phone!<\/p>\n

In a way, Aunt D does pause. She devotes a paragraph to saying that the two little nieces are \u201cbeautiful, talented and privileged girls\u201d and the uncle is \u201cjust\u201d sick.\u00a0She concludes, \u201cbear in mind it could be worse.\u201d<\/p>\n

You begin to see why I had trouble getting through the first page, and the vertigo only multiplies. Because Aunt D and her sister are so damaged, they can barely pick their way through their lives, and they can barely do their jobs as mother and god-mother.<\/p>\n

The only way to discuss this story fairly is to discuss what it\u2019s really talking about beneath its Lenny Bruce-like assault on the reader.\u00a0So what follows here is spoiler city.\u00a0(I don\u2019t want to dissuade you from the story. It is weird and requires a lot of puzzling, but its central subject is serious.\u00a0It is probably the most memorable story I have read on this subject.)<\/p>\n

Incest is a word not spoken in this \u201cChristmas\u201d story, but incest is obviously its topic.\u00a0It is the secret that no one can mention, even when the evidence is obvious. When uncle-the-pedophile arranges to repeatedly get down on the floor so he can look up under the dress of the six year old, everyone sees it, but no one is able to name it, call it, stop it, or act on behalf of the child. Aunt D and her sister go to such dysfunctional lengths to ignore what they see that the reader deduces that they have their own incestuous history with this uncle as well.<\/p>\n

When Aunt D\u2019s father died, this rich uncle took his sister-in-law and four children and promised to pay for their education. The mother played the role of housewife.\u00a0Aunt D\u2019s loony mal-adjustment to life, her hallucinations, and her hunger points to her being the object of her uncle\u2019s attentions in the past.\u00a0Her sister\u2019s ineffectual attempts to take control (like trying to save five cats or give a huge Christmas party) indicate her own damage as well. Most damning is the sister\u2019s loony idea that sexual abuse or pedophilia should never be mentioned to the children.<\/p>\n

The real tip-off to the incest of Aunt D and her sister is their mother, a woman who prayed an hour every afternoon in their childhood and went to church twice a week\u00a0— thus absenting herself from having to protect her children. The fact that the older sister insists on denying that the uncle preyed on her daughter is further confusion.<\/p>\n

Money is a means of persuasion in this family.\u00a0The uncle having first promised to pay for four educations, Aunt D now uses awkward promises of money to try to get Adira, her niece, to fight back. That Adira knows how to bargain is frightening, but what is the most frightening is that for the past year, since the assault of the previous Christmas, seven year old Adira has taken to dressing in gray track pants and her Sponge-Bob tee shirt.\u00a0Her mother, the one of the perfect gingerbread mansion, has taken no notice.<\/p>\n

So, this story is not really about miracles, or Christmas, or cats, or illness, or hunger.\u00a0This story is about a familial pattern of incest, as well as a familial pattern of denial, and the inevitable result:\u00a0identity confusion and dysfunction.\u00a0Aunt D\u2019s adult illnesses, hunger, hallucinations, and lack of job success make more sense, once you realize that she was probably sexually used by the uncle in her childhood, part of the price of the money the uncle provided. \u201cI knew I shouldn\u2019t cause trouble,\u201d she says.<\/p>\n

Aunt D believes she loves the nieces but she isn\u2019t able to describe them in as much detail as she describes all five of the cats. This invisibility is part of the little girls\u2019 vulnerability. The fact that their mother is obsessed with the big house, the big party, and the big role as cat-savior also puts her little invisible girls at risk.\u00a0That she would even let the uncle in the house after Aunt D\u2019s report of abuse is unbelievable.\u00a0But that is, in fact, what families do.<\/p>\n

The grandmother exemplifies the neglect, silence, and deafness that typify an incestuous family.\u00a0Against orders, the grandmother lets one of the cats out. The cat is killed right in front of the window. \u201cBut I was right there,\u201d she says stubbornly. This stubborn denial of responsibility is also typical of mothers in incestuous families. The abuser is the meal-ticket, and mothers cling stubbornly to a meal-ticket even if they know the meal-ticket is abusing a child.\u00a0In the case of this story, the uncle has been an oil-well of meal-tickets.<\/p>\n

The emphasis on the narrator\u2019s hunger, the coyote\u2019s hunger, and the sister\u2019s hunger is a natural effect of the neglect and insufficiency of care.<\/p>\n

Names are a problem in this family and a problem for the reader as well. The cats all have real names that don\u2019t shift.\u00a0The other characters do not seem to have stable names, and Aunt D is liberal with her abusive nicknames for her niece\u00a0— \u201csmellface\u201d and \u201ctardface.\u201d (I can hardly bear her use of the latter.) The story is addressed to someone named K, who of course reminds us of Kafka, but Aunt D says K is Russian\u00a0— more identity instability. While much more could be said, suffice it here to say that the instability of names is an interesting device that underscores the author\u2019s probable point: that incest destroys the formation of a stable self.<\/p>\n

This instability of self is echoed in the narrator\u2019s sense of hearing her bacterial infection speak to her. The infection\u2019s voice is, in fact, an alternative Self <\/i>which she calls Bartonella<\/i>.\u00a0Bartonella speaks truth to power. In contrast, Aunt D has a \u201crational me\u201d that decides it\u2019s okay if the uncle looks up the little girl\u2019s dress, and at the same time, she has a crazy self that thinks she \u201cwants to kill something\u201d because she allowed the uncle to look up the little girl\u2019s dress.<\/p>\n

I mention the deafness I hear in this family, but Curtis makes a point of blindness. The last cat standing is Crow, and she has a habit of presenting \u201cmy sister\u201d with mice whose eyes have been gouged out. It\u2019s as if the cat is a sign from another world, signifying that it was time for \u201cmy sister\u201d to open her own eyes.\u00a0The grandmother tells a story about Jesus spitting into the eyes of a blind man to restore his sight. In a way, I see Curtis spitting into the blindness of her readers in order to restore our sight.<\/p>\n

Finally, the hallucinations that the narrator experiences are related to the out-of-body experience that sexual assault victims use to survive an assault.\u00a0The narrator describes seeing that very look on the six year old\u2019s face when the uncle was assaulting the little girl.<\/p>\n

In the Page-Turner interview (here<\/a>), editor Willing Davidson describes the story telling style as \u201canarchic,\u201d as if the author is turning the tables on conventional modes of storytelling. Actually, the style reminds me of Poe, in that the author uses mental instability as her method of storytelling. In Poe\u2019s case, it is a variety of paranoia directing the story telling, while with Curtis, the mental instability is directly related to the effects of incest. Incest is the force that creates the anarchy in this story.<\/p>\n

But let\u2019s get back to where we started: the title, \u201cThe Christmas Miracle.\u201d The story\u2019s miracle is that one of the cats fights back and survives. She has lost all of one hind leg and half of the other, but she survives. At story\u2019s end, Aunt D says of that moment in the vet\u2019s office: \u201cIt was a miracle she was alive.\u201d<\/p>\n

Okay, don\u2019t get lost here —\u00a0we\u2019re still talking about the title. Ordinarily, I would consider the Christmas miracle to be something having to do with a message of peace, love and acceptance. In this story, the miracle is not acceptance, but the necessity to use our native animal urge to fight for our lives.\u00a0Really fight.<\/p>\n

In her Page-Turner interview,\u00a0Curtis says that the ultimate turn in the story, when the sister orders Uncle Pedophile out of the house,\u00a0 was suggested by her writers’\u00a0group.\u00a0It is hard to understand why Curtis herself did not write this part, as it seems to be the real miracle. Without the sister finding the courage to turn the uncle out, there would be no miracle. I almost wonder if Curtis knew this had to be the ending, but needed her readers to engage in writing the story\u00a0— much as I am doing here.)<\/p>\n

The problem with this story is not so much that it is revolting, which it is in places, or a revolting take on Christmas, which it is in places, but that it is so gelatinous in form.\u00a0There are so many shifts, so many layers, so many hallucinations, and so many instabilities that the story is hard to keep straight. Nonetheless, it may be the most memorable story I have read on the topic of incest, twinning as it does, the desire for a Christmas card family with the invisible self that incest creates.<\/p>\n

What you come away with is this:\u00a0incest is a double lock, an open secret welded to stubborn denial.\u00a0That kind of double lock makes mothers, daughters, and godmothers crazy deaf, crazy blind, and just plain crazy.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Click here to read the abstract of the story on The New Yorker\u00a0webpage (this week\u2019s story is available only for subscribers). Rebecca Curtis\u2019s \u201cThe Christmas Miracle\u201d was originally published in the December 23 & 30, 2013 issue of The New Yorker. Betsy \u201cThe Christmas Miracle,\u201d by Rebecca Curtis, is not for the squeamish. She says as […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"libsyn-item-id":0,"libsyn-show-id":0,"libsyn-post-error":"","libsyn-post-error_post-type":"","libsyn-post-error_post-permissions":"","libsyn-post-error_api":"","playlist-podcast-url":"","libsyn-episode-thumbnail":"","libsyn-episode-widescreen_image":"","libsyn-episode-blog_image":"","libsyn-episode-background_image":"","libsyn-post-episode-category-selection":"","libsyn-post-episode-player_use_thumbnail":"","libsyn-post-episode-player_use_theme":"","libsyn-post-episode-player_height":"","libsyn-post-episode-player_width":"","libsyn-post-episode-player_placement":"","libsyn-post-episode-player_use_download_link":"","libsyn-post-episode-player_use_download_link_text":"","libsyn-post-episode-player_custom_color":"","libsyn-post-episode-itunes-explicit":"","libsyn-post-episode":"","libsyn-post-episode-update-id3":"","libsyn-post-episode-release-date":"","libsyn-post-episode-simple-download":"","libsyn-release-date":"","libsyn-post-update-release-date":"","libsyn-is_draft":"","libsyn-new-media-media":"","libsyn-post-episode-subtitle":"","libsyn-new-media-image":"","libsyn-post-episode-keywords":"","libsyn-post-itunes":"","libsyn-post-episode-itunes-episode-number":"","libsyn-post-episode-itunes-season-number":"","libsyn-post-episode-itunes-episode-type":"","libsyn-post-episode-itunes-episode-title":"","libsyn-post-episode-itunes-episode-author":"","libsyn-destination-releases":"","libsyn-post-episode-advanced-destination-form-data":"","libsyn-post-episode-advanced-destination-form-data-enabled":"","libsyn-post-episode-advanced-destination-form-data-input-enabled":false,"libsyn-post-episode-premium_state":"","libsyn-episode-shortcode":"","libsyn-episode-embedurl":"","_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":true,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[94,474],"tags":[],"coauthors":[],"class_list":["post-10574","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-new-yorker-fiction","category-rebecca-curtis"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/pqqvZ-2Ky","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_likes_enabled":false,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/mookseandgripes.com\/reviews\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/10574","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/mookseandgripes.com\/reviews\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/mookseandgripes.com\/reviews\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mookseandgripes.com\/reviews\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mookseandgripes.com\/reviews\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=10574"}],"version-history":[{"count":4,"href":"https:\/\/mookseandgripes.com\/reviews\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/10574\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":10606,"href":"https:\/\/mookseandgripes.com\/reviews\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/10574\/revisions\/10606"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/mookseandgripes.com\/reviews\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=10574"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mookseandgripes.com\/reviews\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=10574"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mookseandgripes.com\/reviews\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=10574"},{"taxonomy":"author","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mookseandgripes.com\/reviews\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/coauthors?post=10574"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}