Aberrations (book review)

Aberrations

by Penelope Przekop

Emerald Book Co, July 2008.  336 pp.  14.95

Angel Duet has narcolepsy. Her dreamy narrative voice allows Aberrations, Penelope Przekop’s debut novel, an almost magical fluidity of language and imagery. Przekop respects the dignity of Angel’s neurological disorder while using the full potential of dream-language to explore this tale of family secrets, emerging sexuality, and self-discovery, set in a small Southern town.

Because Angel falls asleep suddenly, she sometimes misses, or disconnects from, the events and relationships happening around her. She must rely on the few people she trusts to catch her when she falls, literally. The disorder can cause a paralyzing condition called cataplexy, during which Angel is powerless to speak or move. Przekop uses these paralyzed episodes best to frustrate Angel at key, tense moments. The mother she never knew haunts the waking dreams that blur the boundaries between Angel’s imagination and reality. Cataplexy and waking dreams transform fairly common emotions into Angel’s vivid physical immediacy.

Angel’s home life combines with her narcolepsy to make her perspective distant and dreamlike. Her father raised her, single-handedly and over-protectively. One of the few clues Angel has about her real mother is a series of framed photographs of clouds. Like the stories she thinks she knows about her past, and the sleep-haze that envelops her days, these mysterious, blurred images frustrate Angel. Working in a hospital gives Angel some sense of independence, while keeping her in a protected space. By taking a job picking cotton, she emerges from her father’s sheltering shadow, and begins to make a few friends. Tim, her bluntly outspoken friend from the cotton fields, dismisses her disease as “narco-whatever” with the same forthrightness with which he announces his own homosexuality. Tim persuades Angel to take Ecstasy instead of her prescribed narcolepsy medicine. The drug keeps her awake and makes her feel confident enough to transcend her isolation and emerge from her carefully circumscribed life. Ecstasy lets her go to clubs, go on dates, and have the normal life she covets. It is a vivid, and wakeful life, but a life full of risks to her fragile health and sense of self.

Positioning Angel’s narration between dream and reality allows a poetic flexibility to infuse Przekop’s storytelling. Haunted by stories and waking dreams of a mother she never knew, Angel describes searching for a sense of mother, a poignant, fleeting sense of security she finds in a series of confusing relationships. Her affair with a married doctor gives her some hint of that feeling. Scarlett, a new friend, tangles Angel’s search for the sense of mother with fumbling emergent sexuality, misunderstanding and hurt feelings. She turns to Tim, her confidant, expecting guidance, but he belittles her feelings.

The discrepancy between Tim’s forthright ease with his own sexuality and his hostile skepticism about Angel’s feelings for Scarlett seems to be a hallmark of the novel’s time and place. Setting the novel in the early 80s, in Shreveport, Louisiana allows history and culture to explain that disconnect to a certain extent; but it might be worth discussing in larger context of queer history.

Aberrations is an entrancing, dreamlike novel of thick and excellent imagery.