What happens when you spend so much time helping someone in distress that you become severely distressed yourself? Compassion fatigue is a condition that frequently affects caregivers and health-care professionals.
Amanda Goldblatt, an English instructor at Northeastern Illinois University and a 2018 National Endowment for the Arts Creative Writing Fellow, offers a surprising and grimly funny take on this state, also known as secondary traumatic stress, in her debut novel “Hard Mouth,” a pithy and offbeat blend of cancer story and adventure tale.
Denise, aka Denny, the directionless 20-something protagonist and her parents’ only child, spends her nights working with fruit flies as a lab technician in the suburbs of Washington, D.C. Her beloved father has had recurrent, terminal cancer on and off for roughly a decade. When he receives his first diagnosis, Denny, at 14, feels “a confused emotional flatulence” and develops “stress-related heartburn” as well as an imaginary friend named Gene, to whom she turns as coping mechanism. The ghostly Gene, a composite of characters from the classic movies she likes to watch with her father, claims to have been friends with Cary Grant. Throughout the novel, Goldblatt uses their sassy and wide-ranging conversations to add dynamism to Denny’s otherwise profound and solitary alienation.
When her father receives his second diagnosis, Denny is finishing up her degree at a local college, and when he receives the third, she has lived so long “under the reeking pendulum of death” that she is ill-equipped to handle the news. “I was filled to the brim with dread; it threatened to spill blackly from my mouth,” she thinks. After her father announces, over an awkward and moribund family dinner, that he has decided that he will not accept treatment, and that “We’re just going to let everything take its course,” neither her real-life friend Ken nor the lingering Gene can do much to comfort her.
The ongoing emergency of her father’s protracted illness has created in Denny an extreme state of tension and preoccupation, and with this declaration, she hits her breaking point. Obsessed with the idea that “I was simply a defenseless meatbag,” she is overcome by the need to “GET AWAY. The clarion call of the oversaturated and truly cracked.”
Though she has lived an entirely soft, suburban life, she takes flight off the grid, responding to an online posting to rent an old cabin with no phone or internet service on a remote mountainside accessible only by small plane or multi-day hike. In other words, a place where “I was no one to anyone but myself.” Denny is too hardened an individual to be miraculously transformed by the sublimity of her surroundings, and Goldblatt is too original a stylist to succumb to the romantic tropes of a conventional wilderness narrative. Rather than romance, what Denny experiences with nature is “a sweaty intimacy, the sort I could then handle.”
Denny learns few transformative lessons about life or herself, but rather experiences a series of smaller revelations, including that “With no responsibility to be a person, I found I was bored. … The drawback of solitude is boredom, is an excess of agency, is yourself.”
Detached as Denny is, not a lot happens plot-wise in the survival section of the novel, during which she has only two visitors, a stray cat and a sullen man. In Denny, Goldblatt creates an almost claustrophobic character study of a bleak, depressed, and selfish protagonist, deeply unlikeable to herself and thus virtually incapable of accepting any overtures of affection or friendship from loved ones and strangers alike. But Goldblatt keeps the pages turning with her incisive descriptions of Denny’s interior state, coupled with her ineptitude as an adventurer and her physical suffering as she experiences the rougher sides of roughing it.
What emerges is a portrait of protracted grief, the deep sorrow that usually comes with the event of someone’s death, but in this case comes preemptively and over an excruciatingly extended period. By the end, “Hard Mouth” leaves readers to consider the vast human question of how to justify going on living — or as Denny’s father puts it, “keeping body and soul together” —when death and suffering are all around.
Kathleen Rooney is the author, most recently, of the novel “Lillian Boxfish Takes a Walk”; her novel “Cher Ami and Major Whittlesey” is forthcoming in 2020.
‘Hard Mouth’
By Amanda Goldblatt, Counterpoint, 256 pages, $25
