A.S. King: Dig

After I read this yesterday, I also read Still Life With Tornado, one of the most upsetting books for someone with a history of a severely dysfunctional family. Without getting into it too much, Still Life echoed a whole lot of bad things about my past.

Dig is quintessential A.S. King in that it features a cast of characters who are terribly stuck in their lives. Other than The Freak, who is the least stuck person on the planet, we meet five characters, all teens, who are in terrible situations. Jake is being abused by his older brother and made to join in actual felonies, not to mention white supremacy nonsense and recruitment. Loretta is living in a trailer with a violent and sexually abusive father and her abused mother. The Shoveler is starting his eighteenth new school (some atrocious number like that) and has decided that shoveling snow solves his problems, though carrying a shovel everywhere with him certainly complicates his social life. Malcolm's father is dying but he's being pushed off on his grandparents and not allowed to be there with him. Katie works fast food and sells drugs at the drivethrough window, and comes to realize how unfair she's being to her black best friend when her own mother is a vicious racist and a terrible person a lot of other ways. 

That's a huge simplification. Each one of those characters is so full and complex and conflicted that I can't begin to sum up everything going on in their lives. This is something King does extremely well. Even her awful characters--and there are a bunch--are complicated and you can see how they ended up where they are. They've nearly always boxed themselves into a corner and can't see a way out. Stuck, again, just like the sympathetic main characters.

I'm so curious why one stuck person is sympathetic when another one isn't. But it seems to come down to whether they have empathy for others and care for others.

By far the least sympathetic of the major characters is Marla, the grandmother (we find out eventually) of all five kids. If you've counted, you know there are six, but Jake isn't part of the family. I'm not exactly sure why Jake is in this story, except that (I'm just going to spoil everything, so buckle up) he and his brother kidnapped, raped, and murdered the girl we know as The Freak. The Freak can jump from place to place around the world, something that seems like magical realism at first, but then we discover she's actually dead. The Freak, the Shoveler (aka David), Katie, Malcolm, and Loretta are all cousins, children of Marla and Gottfried's five estranged children. 

One scene that showed just how different these kids are, and explains why we like them so much more than any of the adults, is that they were set to do an Easter egg hunt, but instead of competing to see who could find more or could find them faster, they worked together, to the outrage of their grandparents, who wanted them to work against each other. That says it all, really. 

Marla is horrible to Gottfried and all of her children. Marla is a real piece of work, an absolute villain disguised as a homey grandma who just wants to make a good Easter dinner for her family. What makes someone with this kind of seemingly altruistic goal into a monster? She only cares about herself. She doesn't care about any of her kids, even though she hasn't seen or talked to several of them in years. She is constantly cruel and dismissive to Gottfried.

Neither Gottfried nor Marla learn the Shoveler's name. Granted, it can be embarrassing when you miss someone's name early on and don't want to ask it, but the Shoveler has been coming to their house for months and they never get past their own embarrassment to be courteous to him by using his name. They don't find it out until Easter, the same day he finds out they're his grandparents.

Classic A.S. King character moves that get you good and stuck: don't talk about things, don't say things, don't address the elephant in the room no matter what. Cut people off, don't mend bridges, don't reach out. 

I really feel like these books are blueprints for how to have a wonderful or a terrible life.

Marla cut off one of her daughters when she got pregnant in high school, just kicked her out and never spoke to her again. That's the act of someone who cares more about her own pride and shame than her daughter's actual life, not to mention her grandchild's life. 

She denies that her son who is dying of cancer is actually dying of cancer. 

She refuses to help her daughter who is stuck in a trailer with an abusive husband, on the grounds her daughter made bad choices and should have to live with them.

All of the cruel, spiteful, judgmental, prideful, hateful choices that Marla makes should come back and bite her at the end of the story, but no, she just sort of fades away, because once the kids have found each other and have gone off to locate The Freak's body, Marla disappears from the narrative. The last thing she does is say something to Gottfried that he doesn't even hear, because he's stopped listening to her. 

A lot of people let go of others in this story. The Shoveler made friends with a neighbor who lent him the original shovel, spent a lot of time with him, treated him like a de facto dad, but then discovers a white supremacist tattoo on the man's shoulder and essentially silently breaks up with him. Katie has to let her best friend, Ian, go, because she realizes she's been using him in a way to get back at her racist mom, and realizes just how awful it must be for Ian to be friends with someone whose mom thinks so little of him. Malcolm has to let go of his impractical plan of running away to Jamaica and being with a girl he met on the beach there, when he realizes how imperialist and exploitative he's being.

There's a constant theme running through the book of racism and how we have to deal with it in complicated real world ways. Really there's about one eighth too much plot and that's mostly the racism material, but also the flea circus. (Don't ask.) It's very interesting to see the ways it plays out for Katie and Jake, and the Shoveler breaking up with his pseudo-dad is actually an extremely cool plot line, but it's awkwardly juxtaposed with all of the dysfunctional family storylines. 

It's about family not treating each other as family, so how does the racism theme work with that? Should we read it as: race is family? No, that doesn't work either. It doesn't all quite fit together. It's a bit like five eighths of one book and four eighths of another book pressed together.

I loved that I had forgotten that The Freak was dead the whole time. You give me magical realism, I figure people are magical and can do magical things. We don't actually know right up until nearly the end that the kids are all connected by family and that terrible crime. We don't know that The Freak was their cousin, even though I can't imagine how anyone would not know that, if her name was in the news, right? Even these awful dysfunctional families like Katie's would tell her that that was her cousin, wouldn't they? Her father would have had the same last name as Marla and Gottfried, the same as Malcolm. And wouldn't the girls know their mothers' maiden names, assuming they changed them at all, which the Shoveler's mother would not, as she was never married? 

I don't like a "buy" like that, when it unravels the whole plot, especially when it's so easy just to make her dad a mom and avoid the whole question of last names.

This book completely wrecks me every time I read it. These kids are so vulnerable and so dependent, but blamed for everything that happens. 

My niece a few weeks ago told me that her dad was furious that she had marked up a clipboard with a box cutter doing an art project. I said: "You're more important than any clipboard." Doesn't that sound obvious? It was never true in our family and it's not obvious in any of these families either. These kids are treated like absolutely everything is more important than they are. Money, work, school, status, everything. It's heartbreaking. 

I feel like A.S. King's collected works should be required reading for all teens, but also for anyone who's stuck. Any time I reread them, I think again: Say the thing. Take the steps. Do the next thing. You don't have to stay stuck. You have the tools to dig out of your weird mind prison and escape. 

It always reminds me of a therapist friend who said, in response to a conversation we were having about how people keep everything bottled up: You're going to have consequences either way. You're already suffering the consequences of not saying the thing. Why not try the consequences of saying the thing? Say the thing!