Blood Isn't Everything

These limits of knowing are writ large in Jia-Hui’s chapters, which are given to the reader “in translation.” Some things, however, are hard to translate: Mandarin characters and Taiwanese words dot the text. In dialogue spoken by David or his mother or strangers on the street, blank spaces indicate the English words Jia-Hui doesn’t understand. Her fear of loneliness—for which she’ll find a terrible solution—is literalized in these empty lines. In The Border of Paradise, no one is fluent enough to overcome their isolation. “I am confident this is where the true sorrow—sorrow? I lack the correct word—began,” David says, “when I learned that it is possible for I hurt, I hurt, I hurt, I hurt to be my only heartbeat.”

Wang’s book is structured like a boomerang; the burden of narration travels down one branch of the family tree and back up another. In the novel’s final section, little frissons of connection register like electric shocks: a casual acquaintance is intimately known, a minor character holds major revelations. This pronged, modern structure grounds the book’s more gothic elements, reminding characters and reader alike of the world beyond the woods.

But where the lines collide, in the teenage bodies of William and Gillian, an ancient drama plays out. Its actors are familiar figures—mother and children, brother and sister—but the characters stand in for a vaster struggle, between the vagaries of fate and the agonies of choice. The anticipation hinges: what will be done to William and Gillian, fairy-tale children lost in the woods? And what will they do?

In Lydia Peelle’s The Midnight Cool, Charles McLaughlin is just a little older and far poorer than William and Gillian, but he’s a lot more confident in what he can—and surely will!—achieve in the burgeoning world of 1916 Tennessee. “Charles was eighteen and certain of one truth,” Peelle writes, “that he would, as his mother promised years ago, someday rise up and win the bread of life.” Such is his rightful inheritance, Charles believes: before her early death, his mother told him so, over and over. Charles’s father, she said, had been a wealthy gentleman with a high-class bloodline; he had loved her and married her and died tragically—a streetcar accident—just before Charles’s birth. His wealthy, high-class family, disapproving of wife and newborn, had kept them from the riches and status they deserved, but blood—Charles’s mother assured him—would win out.

It is not as obvious to Charles as it is to you that this story is a lie, a tall tale toward which a poor boy might aspire. His sense of self rests on that buried bloodline and the downright unfairness of its absence, both for him and for his mother, once promised a fortune and buried in a pauper’s grave. “All that was left of it,” he thinks, of her loving and singular life, “all of it, was grass.” But as grieved as he is over this wrong, Charles is just as sure that someday it will be rectified. “This is America,” he tells a friend. “You, me, anybody can do it… A man’s just got to write his own story.”

As a kid, the orphaned Charles is taken in by Billy Monday, a wise-cracking Irish immigrant and swindler. The men make a living trading damaged goods for slightly less damaged goods, conning locals and moving on. On good days, they trade horses or mules, whose age or illness or flaws they cover up: painting gray coats black, filing worn teeth into straightness, drugging the animals up into liveliness or down into calm. They never lie—Billy won’t allow it—but they manage to bend the truth into some pretty shapes along the way. Charles and Billy are bound to each other by a connection stronger than blood: care, respect, affection, the long companionship of a decade spent together. But it’s what they lack—family; respectability; money, of course—that circles like a lasso, threatening capture.

On a single fateful—or choice-filled—day in Richfield, Charles falls in love with a wealthy girl named Catherine Hatcher, and the men find themselves possessed of a beautiful, murderous, untamable horse called The Midnight Cool. Their own tricks have been used against them: the horse was heavily sedated when Charles, impulsive and ambitious, bought her from Leland Hatcher, Catherine’s father. “Charles was still green enough to think that rich men achieved their station in life because they deserved it,” Billy says, of his protégé’s misguided belief in Leland’s decency.

Billy knows better, though he isn’t wholly immune to some other yarns told by his adopted home. “Four hundred blessed bucks out of nearly nothing,” he thinks, after an early and auspicious trade. “That was the inalienable truth that Billy had learned about America. Here in the land of plenty you could live mighty well off the trash.” And it’s true that he lives better than he would have on the small, storm-battered island he left at 14. Billy changed his name upon arriving in America, dropping the Irish O’Maonlai for Monday—the beginning of the work week, a fresh start, a day all effort and promise.

But not everything can be changed so easily: what has been done to someone cannot always be overcome by force of will, by a country’s supposed largesse. Billy learned this long ago, in the pitch-black of a coal mine and the wake of broken promises, and Charles learns it too, bit by bit: from Gus, the brain-damaged son of an auctioneer, dropped on his head as a baby; from the stable-boy Twitch, as dirt-poor as Charles but lacking his smooth tongue and talent; from Ernestine, a medium telling the living whatever they need to hear from the dead; and from Catherine, consumed with fury at all she has inherited—an overbearing father, a woman’s body—that keeps her from joining her brother on the front lines of Europe’s war.

“I still think that statue’s a farce,” Catherine says, of the monument in New York’s harbor. “Liberty. My mother didn’t have it. I don’t. No woman does.” Her patriotism is skeptical, burning but clear-eyed, not naïve like Charles’s nor souring into racist nationalism like Twitch’s and Leland’s and so many others. “Kuntz once said to me that in America it don’t matter where a man comes from,” Charles says, late in the novel, his naïvete fading. “But look what happened to poor Kuntz. Run out of town for no reason but the fact of where he came from.”

Charles gets a proper job and starts making real money; America enters the war. Man and country alike try to live up to the story they’ve told themselves about themselves: a worthy gentleman; the world’s exemplar. “Tell a story enough times, it don’t matter that it’s a bald-faced lie,” a shopkeeper once said to Billy—but Billy doesn’t lie, remember, no matter how he might elide certain precarious truths. As the novel’s aching conclusion nears, Charles has to decide whether he too hews to this code, its lessons embedded in him as surely as if it were inherited. His father might have been (why not?) the wealthy, upper-crust figure of his fantasy, but it’s Billy Monday who raised and made him.

a dream being something sprung from our unconscious bodies, both of us and apart. We make it happen and it happens to us; we interpret or we shrug off, waking

“[I]f you look at a novel or a democracy one way, it is the tale of one person; if you look at it another way, it is a tale of a group,” writes Smiley. The tale itself is singular, but the rivers that fill it intermingle. Inherited? Perhaps. Inescapable? Perhaps not. Billy became William Monday; Jia-Hui became Daisy Nowak; names and lives are changed through both choice and force. (It makes all the difference in the world, of course, which is which.) Like The Border of Paradise, The Midnight Cool twists and buckles the myth of the American dream—a dream being something sprung from our unconscious bodies, both of us and apart. We make it happen and it happens to us; we interpret or we shrug off, waking.

“What do they say about an old mule, Charlie boy?” Billy says. “‘No hope of progeny, no pride of posterity.’ A mule’s got nothing but his own life to prove himself by. A man’s not much better off than a mule, in the end. A man’s got his lifetime. No more and no less.” Every mule is the end of his bloodline, but blood isn’t everything in the end. Our lives are composed of both: what we do, what is done to us. What a terrible thing to reckon with, either way, and what a blessing. We are powerless; we are responsible.

“You think that’s true?” Charles asks, and Billy replies: “I reckon that’s the beauty and the shame of it, all at once.”