Sorry to Disrupt the Peace

When I began Patty Yumi Conttrell’s novel Sorry to Disrupt the Peace, I didn’t like it.  More specifically, I was repulsed.  I recognized that it was well-written; I could appreciate it as a fine work of fiction.  But I didn’t enjoy reading it.  As I moved through the novel, though, I realized that this isn’t a novel meant to be enjoyed; it isn’t easy to digest.  It is, after all, a story about suicide.

The blurb on the back of the book (at least for my copy) doesn’t do the novel justice: “Helen Moran is thirty-two years old, single, childless, college-educated, and partially employed as a guardian of troubled young people in New York.”  This is all true, but the blurb fails to mention that Helen is under investigation from her organization of employment for most of the novel, likely because she made a bag of heroin in a locker go missing (by giving it to a deadbeat father she met on the subway), and because she regularly gives marijuana to her troubled young people and to her coworkers.  It also fails to mention that Helen is single because she abhors sex, and childless because she dislikes children.  These are not qualities that she considers personal failings, and certainly not the most interesting aspects of her character.

I don’t think I’ve read a novel before where the protagonist is both an unreliable narrator yet extremely blunt.  Helen is hypocritically obsessed with ethics—hypocritically because she repeatedly does several unethical things throughout the novel (while thinking that they are ethical), including giving the troubled young people marijuana because “it calms them down… it helps them focus on real things, they smoke it and they mellow” (103).  She has no self-recognition that doing this might be perceived as unethical.  In response to learning that she is under investigation from her organization, she says, “I was certain I myself would never be under investigation, because my infractions were so minor” (119).

She, in fact, has very little self-recognition for most things.  In order to get to the bottom of her brother’s suicide, she finds six reasons for suicide from a mental-wellness site, and proceeds to tell most people she meets of these Internet findings—including two of her brother’s friends and an old colleague—seemingly having no awareness of her inappropriate behavior.  As another example, she convinces herself that despite her trials and tribulations living in Manhattan, she is a very happy person, and “even found happiness in the free bagels my organization sometimes provided during work meetings!  Would an unhappy and miserable person find perfect peace and contentment in stale bagels with no cream cheese?” (62).  For Helen, the answer is “no,” but for anyone else (including the readers), the answer is an obvious “yes.”

To further show her unreliability as a narrator, other characters around her often contradict her worldviews.  Her mother looks at Helen “incredulously” when her daughter tells her that she looks after troubled young people.  Her brother, too, expresses concern about her choice in profession, diagnosing her as bipolar or schizophrenic in the process: “I can’t believe she takes care of people as her job (!)” (247).  We can’t take Helen’s mother or her brother as reliable characters individually, but since they both have the same concern about Helen’s ability (or inability) to take care of troubled young people, in addition to Helen’s obviously unethical behavior in the workplace, we have pretty good evidence that Helen’s perception of the world is somewhat skewed.

Helen’s own unreliability as a narrator, though, becomes a kind of meta narrative; while she investigates the reason for her brother’s suicide, she comes across more and more confusing clues, and worries that she does not know her brother as well as she thought she did.  The reader is blindsided as well, because Helen establishes fairly early on that she was close to her brother.  She describes playing “Confession” with her brother at a young age, and how her mother and her brother “were the people closest to me in life, based on the sheer amount of time we once spent together.”  Multiple times, she goes into detail about her brother’s characteristics, particularly on page 82, where a long paragraph ends with the conclusion, “he stayed the same his entire life.  He never changed.”

She seems to be the only person who ever understood her brother.  She remembers her brother visiting her in Manhattan and lamenting that their parents “don’t really understand anything about who I am.”  Helen agrees, “they’ve never understood either of us” (169).  After discovering a series of strange things involved in her brother’s life, however, Helen worries that she doesn’t understand her brother.  He had a book on cars; he went fly-fishing with family in Colorado; her claimed to assist a professor with research; as previously mentioned, he decided to visit Helen in Manhattan, even though he rarely traveled.  These details don’t match up with Helen’s understanding of who her brother is—or was.

Helen’s uncertainty about her brother’s death feels different from her general narrative unreliability.  Using Helen as an unreliable narrator gives the novel its darkly comedic tone, since the reader is in on the joke and can plainly see how unaware Helen is.  But casting doubt on her brother’s reason for suicide—and more importantly, on Helen’s understanding of her brother—turns the novel into a mystery, and also makes the tone more dark than comedic.

Though Helen is often out of touch with reality, she is at the same time entrenched in the minute, disgusting details of reality.  Helen launches into several descriptions of her surroundings that can only be described as gross: her masturbation with a bathroom towel, noticing her brother’s dried mucus in the bathroom, an incident where someone harassed her and she bit off a piece of his tongue (this part in particular I almost had to read through my fingers), the bedbugs that infested her bed in Manhattan, the bugs crawling on plants, the black worm in an apple, the dust and dirt covering her parents’ home.  Helen—and moreover, Conttrell—does not pass up the opportunity to give us a disgusting visual.  Helen even describes herself as ugly and plain.  Nothing in the novel is romanticized; Helen sees every speck of dirt and tells us about its every detail.

Helen is keenly aware of the grime surrounding her, of physical grossness and how it affects her senses, yet when it comes to relationships, social behaviors, ethics, and her own existence, she is out of touch with reality.  She is fine with describing body odor and the pubic hair left on her masturbation towel, but when talking to her parents about her brother’s suicide, or when looking in the mirror in her brother’s bedroom, she disassociates.  She often speaks out loud to “no one.”  She prefers to be “the neutral and passive observer” (217). 

At one point, she reflects on the lies her brother told her while he was alive, and she says, “It never occurred to me to intervene.  I could be described as many things, but I was not an intervener…and perhaps I was afraid of intervening, because to intervene would mean to communicate with and confront my adoptive parents, people I hadn’t looked at in the face for years, perhaps because I was afraid of their faces and always had been” (163-4).  It almost seems as though Helen focuses on the gruesome, physical details of the world around her to avoid the painful, complicated emotions associated with her parents, her brother’s suicide, and herself.

Near the end of the novel, Helen says, “We do whatever we have to do to keep ourselves from going into the abyss” (271).  However repulsive it may be, perhaps Helen’s preoccupation with the “viscerally unsettling” (to take a quote from the blurb) is her way of keeping herself from going into the abyss.  In terms of the novel, its disgusting descriptions combined with its unreliable narration create the perfect dark humor for telling a story about suicide.

-Leah