Sorry to Disrupt the Peace

As Helen Moran investigated her brother’s suicide, I found myself absorbed in my own investigation of Helen.  Who is this narrator who perceives things with almost superhuman sensitivity (“I felt a blast of heat emanating from the underpants, probably my adoptive father’s” (207), yet misses social cues and says the most inappropriate things (“Then I said or thought, What a difficult time it is!  What a toll it has taken! My adoptive mother and Chad Lambo continued to look at me in amazement and disgust, a disgust reserved for cockroaches” (73))? 

My immediate thought was Mark Haddon’s The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time, which admittedly I read over ten years ago.  The set-up of the novel is similar: the narrator Christopher, a teenage boy with Asperger’s or mild autism, becomes engrossed in the investigation of the murder of his neighbor’s dog and is shocked to discover in the process lies his father fed him over the years.  Helen’s adoptive mother thinks Helen hates herself; her brother suggests that she might be an undiagnosed bipolar or schizophrenic.  Her brother’s hypothesis “astonishes” Helen, but more than that, it reassures her to read about herself.  “I exist!” she says.  “I was in his life!  I played a major role, fuckers!” (244).  Like Christopher, Helen is an outsider in the world (except maybe among her “troubled youth”) and within her own family, and despite Helen’s often very inappropriate behavior, Patty Yumi Cottrell wins our sympathy for her by placing a magnifying glass over her internal world, showing us a scarred woman who ultimately just wants to be part of something, who wants to count.

We read this book as if we are in Helen’s body, in her nasal cavities that “burn” with a memory of “the smell of the closet in Milwaukee” (14), in her face that “began to itch as [she] thought of the pesticide,” the thought alone causing small hives to erupt on her cheeks (55).  We get a microscopic view of “trillions of cells…teeming invisibly underneath our noses” (74).  It is at times revolting to be this close to a character, especially a character that does not always act as we might.  But we FEEL what it is to be Helen.  It’s overwhelming, not because Cottrell says it is, but because we get the play-by-play of feelings and emotions, Helen’s “thought-secretions oozing out like toxic slime” (38).  Nothing is beautiful at the level of pores and pubic hairs. 

Interwoven with the toxic slime thoughts is the toxic slime of Helen’s childhood.  At first I sympathized with our protagonist—I think the natural tendency is to believe and try to like your narrator from the start—and from the first sentence we knew she was going through a difficult time.  Then we are shown how she behaves and, like the people around her, I pulled back.  There is blood on her hands (quite literally after she falls in a ditch)—she wasn’t there for her brother when he needed her, or ever.  But unlike the people around her, we see so much more.  I ended the book rooting for Helen, having quite a bit of empathy for her.  Like Christine Hyung-Oak Lee, she went through a lot—she doesn’t go into detail about her first five years in New York City, but we can suspect the worst. 

By the end of the book, Helen and maybe her brother are the only “human” humans left.  The others are truly monsters:  The mother who repeatedly asked Helen why she hated herself.  The father who refused resuscitation for his son because of the humiliation of failed suicide, who was concerned that he hadn’t taken his son to a fancy restaurant for one of their last meals together despite the fact that they had gone to his son’s favorite restaurant.  The two parents who can’t even greet their daughter warmly when she shows up at their door, who pretty much set her up to miss her brother’s funeral.  The racist family members, the racist kids at school. 

Helen’s intense interiority often fails to see the people around her.  “It looked like Thomas was crying,” she recounts, “but I wasn’t sure, so I kept talking” (110).  But then her father gives his terrible monologue about stopping in front of the Greek restaurant and Helen’s reaction is severe, she begins to retch.  This monologue by her father is one of the few times when we really step outside of Helen’s head, and it confirms everything Helen previously suggests about her father and more.  What an interesting moment Cottrell chooses for Helen’s reaction to be appropriate. 

“Sorry to disturb the peace” is Helen’s stock apology.  Sorry I exist.  No wonder she envisions herself as having been born “a shabby little baby” (18).  This is how she has internalized her childhood.  When she looks at her brother’s past, we see her looking at herself, “the person everyone thought he was and wasn’t” (245).  She reaches the conclusion that her brother’s suicide was “the first thing in his life he had ever done for himself” (263), even as he hoped it would help people in need of organs receive lifesaving transplants.  “Who am I to you?” begins his document A Note About Swans and Organs.  Like Helen, her brother wanted to have a part in other people’s stories.  Neither found this through their family or the life their family set them up to live.  

--Gina