As early blog posts highlighted, emerging novelist and established author, Rebecca Makkai, visited her alma mater W&L on October 26th. My creative writing class (also with Professor Smith) was fortunate to host the author, who is now a staple on the American Best Short Stories catalog. A month later I have finished her debut novel The Borrower, which she spoke about in her lecture and visit to class. The review in the current issue of Shenandoah and previous blog posts articulate the strengths and dominate elements of Makkai’s novel. During her time in our class, Makkai spoke of her literary influences and their impact on her work. She mentioned Nabokov and Twain among other literary greats. Makkai’s central character is Lucy, an underemployed librarian in no-man’s land Missouri; like the author who created her, Lucy possesses a vast repertoire of literary references that drives her narrative and gives validity to her character. In The Borrower, Makkai employs an unreliable narrator and a plethora of literary allusions. Appealing to both English majors and more casual reader, the work effortlessly exudes a natural love for literature, but with the expectation for an educated reader.
Like her post-modern influences, Makkai presents literary allusions, phrases and themes with some, but not all of the clues to fully appreciate her “librarian” narrative. With the story’s prologue, “Ian was Never Happy Unless There Was a Prologue,” an English major or Midwestern librarian may comprehend the purposeful placement of her allusions, but will the average reader? For the Makkai, I believe the answer is: “no matter.” The prologue magnifies a runaway, and the narrator, Lucy, makes a reference to the culmination of one of the great American novels, Huck Finn. Lucy states: “They tell me to light out for the Territory, reckon I’m headed for Hell just like them.” Comparing one’s plight with Huck Finn is quite the comparison in the literary spectrum, but Lucy does so with panache and irony as she begins to narrate the absurd events of her impromptu kidnap. She even directly acknowledges the two extremes of literary runaways: Huck and Humbert. Some critics may argue the allusions are rudimentarily overt, but she speaks as a librarian and those are her terms. With this prologue, Makkai gives the reader a Rosetta stone on how to approach the rest of the novel.
Moreover, in her discussion with my creative writing class, Makkai also spoke of her fascination with unreliable narrators, a literary technique implemented in The Borrower. As previously stated, Lucy retrospectively compares her crimes to Lolita’s Humbert Humbert, who also kidnapped a vulnerable youth and embarked on a cross-country road trip. The novel could be defined as a re-envisioning of Nabokov’s masterpiece with the dark humor and sexuality replaced with feverish wit and a love of books. Using Lolita as a map, Makkai’s novel presents Lucy as both the hero and villain. However, Makkai subtly presents the connection. The prologue encompasses the entire novel’s message of modesty and the elevation of normalcy gone wrong. She states, “regardless of who the villain is, I am not the hero of the story.” The hero is certainly Ian, but like Lolita the line of distinction is blurry.
Makkai succeeds in her allusion with the wit and poise of a writer with much more experience. But after all, she did work for Shenandoah.