Like the storeroom, Tryon’s novel is cluttered with childish treasures, an abundance of little precious objects: there is the magic ring, of course, “Peregrine for Perry,” and “the Thing,” wrapped in blue tissue paper; the bouquet of clover; the gold moon pin Grandma Ada wears, and her sunflowers; Russell’s glasses; the pitchfork and the rose shears; Holland’s harmonica; the kewpie doll lamp; the “changeling” in the bottle at the fair; the hat and cape of Professor Rabbitwaters; the jumping beans; the rooster Chanticleer; the wasp in the wine; and that terrible wine cask itself . . .
And wound round all these images are music and chants: the children’s song “How Many Miles to Babylon,” and Brünnhilde’s final aria from Götterdämmerung, and Ada’s aphorism, “Beware of mad dogs lurking...” Even Holland’s cruel killing of his grandmother’s cat seems to echo with an innocent nursery rhyme: “Ding Dong Bell, Pussy in the well...”
It is in this net of imagery that the novel creates its spell. Tryon performs a remarkable feat in turning these vivid details into both emotional iconography and important plot devices. What at first seem like casual surface descriptions develop, as the book progresses, into “characters” in their own right; objects and characters become deeply intertwined.
And yet this formal virtuosity doesn’t fully explain the novel’s resonance. To me, The Other stands alongside previously undervalued genre novels such as those by Shirley Jackson, Patricia Highsmith, Jim Thompson, Ray Bradbury, and others, not only because of its innovative and influential plot mechanics, but because of its depth of feeling and emotional nuance—its ability to grip and possess the reader. The Other is more than a great thriller; it is also, surprisingly, an intense, lyrical meditation on childhood, nostalgia, and loss. And it is the tension between these two apparently incongruous impulses that gives the novel its strange and beautiful power.
The novel is really about the moment when the weapons of childhood are revealed to be no more than a box of tricks. It’s a parable of the terror many of us come to around age twelve or thirteen, a deeply disturbing epiphany. In discussing James Joyce’s story “Araby,” Sheila Schwartz describes a universal willed delusion of early adolescence:
What the character has been battling throughout the story is the ugliness and despair of his daily life, but he’s been battling with the weapons of a child (the games in the street, the spying on adult life, the investment of setting with tinges of mystery and romance—“the dark dripping gardens,” “the dark odorous stables where a coachman smoothed and combed the horse or shook music from the buckled harness,” all the usual exemptions and evasions of childhood from adult responsibility, adult knowledge), and these weapons will no longer be effective, nor even consoling.
How did the magic-infused world of our childhood grow so shabby and ordinary? How is it possible that the indomitable adults we remember become weak and fallible, age, die one by one? The Other suggests what we have narcissistically suspected all along—it’s all our fault! We didn’t know it, but we were at the center of this great catastrophe. Our well-remembered pasts, like the Perry family farm, are each a little Atlantis, sinking into the sea; a memory, that, on second thought, was never accurate anyway.
The novelist Peter Straub has said that horror is the genre of literature most closely concerned with loss: our fear of it, its approach, its inevitable triumph.
Such, at least, is the case with The Other. There are the grand horrors of death and madness, and then there are the little horrors. The world of trolley cars and brewing root beer and listening to crystal radios, now utterly vanished. Everyone once loved and remembered, now dead. The enigmatic Shadow Hills on the way to Babylon is just a shabby suburb, and Babylon itself not a magic kingdom but only an asylum you will live in, bored and lonely, until you die, the world “beautiful and sorrowful and infinitely changed.”
If only my thirteen-year-old self could lift his head to find that thirty-five years have passed! That little Nebraska village, and everyone in it, is dust, along with the strange adolescent I once was. “He was gone, of course,” the narrator says in the last chapter of The Other. “I could not conjure him up as he had me.”
And yet, rereading this book, I can conjure my old self, that lost feeling of mystery and terrible magic. Legerdemain. I remember.
Legerdemain.
—DAN CHAON
THIS IS A NEW YORK REVIEW BOOK
PUBLISHED BY THE NEW YORK REVIEW OF BOOKS
435 Hudson Street, New York, NY 10014
www.nyrb.com
Copyright © 1971 by Thomas Tryon
Afterword copyright © 2012 by Dan Chaon
All rights reserved.
Cover image: Ralph Eugene Meatyard, Untitled, c. 1962; © the estate of Ralph Eugene Meatyard, courtesy Fraenkel Gallery, San Francisco
Cover design: Katy Homans
The Library of Congress has cataloged the earlier printing as follows:
Tryon, Thomas.
The other / by Thomas Tryon ; afterword by Dan Chaon.
p. cm. — (New York Review Books Classics)
ISBN 978-1-59017-583-5 (alk. paper)
1. Psychological fiction. I. Chaon, Dan. II. Title.
PS3570.R9O55 2012
813'54—dc23
eISBN 978-1-59017-598-9
v.0
For a complete list of books in the NYRB Classics series, visit www.nyrb.com or write to:
Catalog Requests, NYRB, 435 Hudson Street, New York, NY 10014
Thomas Tryon, The Other
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