The Tide
King
Jen Michalski. Black Lawrence Press, $18 paperback (368pp)
ISBN: 978-1-937854-37-9
Magic, real magic, carries a price that must be paid, and
requires a coldness of spirit that can't be faked. Amateurs cannot fathom the
horrors they unleash by assuming that magic fixes things, makes things better,
creates rather than destroys.
Jen Michalski knows this. She writes her fable of eternal
youth and perpetual healing as the painful, costly thing it is. Michalski
offers this modern take on The Picture of
Dorian Gray as a parable of kind intentions gone metastatic. Stanley
Polensky means well when he curses the dying Calvin Johnson with eternal youth.
Calvin Johnson means well when he offers his "gift" to the one woman
he's ever loved, as she is old and dying. Heidi Polensky, daughter of a mother
who wanted nothing to do with her and a father who didn't sire her, means well
when she curses herself with eternal youth to keep her one true love, Calvin,
company.
And none of these good intentions have the slightest effect
on the painful reality: Control is an illusion, and control of death is fraught
with so much unknowable baggage as to be a terrifying power much to be avoided.
Michalski, much published and well versed in the narrative
arts, gives us a chilling ride through the blasted emotional landscape of
life's losers. Stanley and Heidi are the people one sees walking to the bus
stop, hunched and defeated, going...well, I've never known where they're going,
can such sad faces actually have jobs, or families, or lives? Surely they're
actors, characters...but here they're alive, and yes they're as sad and
defeated as their faces. But they're also human beings longing for more, and
tragically, they get it.
Like all mortal characters from immortal myths, the Polenskys
haven't learned what to hope for, wish for, or how to use a gift (sparingly and
after much thought!), because no one anywhere ever has believed they could have
a gift at all. But Calvin, the recipient twice over of the Polensky's gifts, is
possibly more to be pitied than even they are. A golden boy, who will eternally
be a boy, grows into an angry and desperate man, choosing dangerous and
difficult things to do with his unearned life, and "succeeding" at
every turn.
But alone. Always, forever, beautiful and accomplished and
alone. It is so unspeakably frightening to imagine being beautiful and isolated
by a secret no one could possibly dream is true....
Had the novel focused on these three characters, and spent
its time exploring their realities, I'd give it my highest recommendation in
spite of copyediting problems ("$230 dollars" is one tooth-gritting
example). But the introduction of a magical elder, Ela, and her Holocaustic
childhood plus the portentous attempt to draw the herbal curse from a misty
past, falls very flat for this reader. The ending, a journey undertaken to fix
that which the characters' "gifts" have broken, is a hollow clanging
hatch being shut on a well of wonderful ideas.
The very real pleasures of Jen Michalski's writing are enough
to make the novel well worthy of your book-buying dollars. It makes me feel sad
that I can't be passionately warbling paeans of encouragement to you. But I am
sure that, if you buy the book, you will spend pleasurable hours savoring its
mellow, lovely prose. And that's enough to make it worth your while. (July
2013)
Purchase The Tide King
HERE.
Reviewer bio: Richard Derus is a biblioholic and a passionate reader. From underneath his tottering towers of unread tomes, he writes obsessively about his darlings at Shelf Inflicted (a group blog), Goodreads (where he is a Forbes 25 top reviewer), LibraryThing (where his personal library is comprehensively cataloged), and Expendable Mudge Muses Aloud, where many otherwise unknown books are praised, panned, or poked fun at.
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