In Averno, Louise Glück’s poetic engagement with the Persephone myth, she writes: “the tale of Persephone / . . . should be read // as an argument between the mother and the lover— / the daughter is just meat.” In this way, the myth can be thought of as being about perspective. Depending on who’s looking—Demeter or Hades—Persephone is a daughter or wife, captive or seductress, girl or woman. Glück goes on to suggest that this conflict is replicated in most retellings—Persephone is “pawed over by scholars,” her role continually contested and drawn over. She isn’t a self, but a series of conflicting framings around consent, complicity, guilt, control, death. In Averno’s poems, however, Glück asks: what if, instead of replicating the same two framings of Persephone, we interrogated the motives behind them? Would looking not through, but at Demeter and Hades allow us to see her from a new angle—a way of refracting the light? What would this myth become if Persephone’s perspective, self-definition, and self-conflict were centered? Glück illustrates—and, in this, demands—that retellings investigate multiple, varied angles, to ask the essential question: “What is in her mind? / Is she afraid? Has something / blotted out the idea / of mind?”
In her second novel, Fruit of the Dead, Rachel Lyon fashions an answer. With an epic, propulsive narrative arc, we follow eighteen-year-old Cory, starting with her last day as a summer camp counselor. She’s on the brink of a pointless gap year, “given that she got into, count them, zero colleges.” Cory is dreading going home to her neurotic, overbearing mother when a camper’s father, Rolo, shows up and offers a kind of salvation: a job watching his kids for the rest of the summer, and if she does well, “the option to extend into some kind of paid internship.” The only caveat: Rolo’s the CEO of a pharmaceutical company under pressure from “various legal tangles,” so, naturally, her job is on his private, Wi-Fi-less island, and she must immediately sign a contract: tell no one where she’s going. This is going to be a problem: alternating chapters follow Cory’s mother, Emer, the director of an agricultural NGO undergoing a major scandal, who is as devoted to Cory as she is uninterested in rectifying her professional mistakes. When Cory texts that she’s going to work a job and provides no other details, there’s nothing Emer would rather do than set off on a quest to find her.
With elegant prose, Lyon expertly dilates and compresses time; reading Fruit of the Dead is akin to stretching your legs out, lying back—then jolting up, realizing you forgot something essential. Cory’s chapters are expansive: she explores Rolo’s island, learns the ins and outs of a new job and coworkers, and grows increasingly entangled with Rolo, trying to decipher his temperamental, mutable fascination with her. This languid pace is also set by Cory’s introduction to “Granadone,” Rolo’s company’s opioid. As the novel goes on, Cory grows increasingly addicted, and her sense of a coherent self, consent, and control dissolves. Emer’s chapters, by contrast, are compressed, urgent, tense; she drives around the country, running against an imagined clock in her search for Cory. Between the pressure of the scandal she’s caused at her company and the stress of searching for her child with no clues, she begins to unravel. When these two narrative strands collide, Emer and Rolo’s conflicting perspectives tear at Cory: who is she, what does she want, and what kind of power does she have? But Lyon always works to turn the mirror back. The synchronicity between Emer and Rolo’s motives and desires reveals that the Persephone myth is really a conflict of power, framed as a conflict of perspective. We must turn to Cory’s mind, one that resists neat categories. Cory’s refusal to settle on one interpretation of her story, her internal dilemmas, and her desire for self-understanding is fraught, complex—and ultimately, rings most true.
While Rolo’s island proves to be no luxury, Fruit of the Dead is—Lyon lingers in “everything . . . that makes Cory Cory,” allowing us to relearn the Persephone myth through the eyes of Persephone, vis-à-vis Cory. Lyon introduces Cory as multiple, shifting; while her self-understanding and desires are centered, they’re also blurry. We enter the first chapter in what appears to be omniscient third person, hovering just a little over Cory’s consciousness. We’re in a “hot and crowded” barn on the last day of camp as the campers put on a play. The stage is set, both literally and metaphorically: the production is The Wizard of Oz—immediately, Cory is situated within a narrative where a girl is separated from her family into a strange world. The Wizard of Oz leads us to believe that through catastrophe, this girl will find herself elsewhere, disoriented—but ultimately find her way home. This kind of elevated, idyllic storyline for Cory is quickly ransacked; in her reflections post-play, we learn that Cory “both wants and does not want to go home . . . to the too-small uptown apartment she shares with her own mother, a verified bitch.” Cory is trying to break free from her mother’s conception of her as a failure. She’s searching for a way to see her own reflection, make her own choices. Here enters Rolo.
Rolo seemingly offers Cory freedom, a space to define herself, but he is also slippery, unable to be seen in any consistent way, least of all by Cory. The moment Cory first encounters him he’s watching her at a distance, “rippling subtly . . . as if appearing to her through liquid.” Rolo’s role in Cory’s life moves liquid through various frames; “the contours of his face seem unstable” to both her and the reader. As he picks his children up from camp, he encourages Cory to come out to eat with them; she goes along, almost despite herself, “as if he had her on a leash.” At the diner, he “analyze[s her] so breezily,” reading her aimlessness, predicting her mother’s “high expectations, low tolerance for fuckuppery,” and offering his island and job as a month-long reprieve. In this first interaction, Cory already can’t tell the difference between fear of Rolo’s power and desire for the security it brings: “Rolo puts an arm around her, and she feels both trapped and protected. The weight of it reassures her. Its strength unnerves her.” Rolo falls under two overlapping frames: an adult who wants to help aimless Cory self-actualize, and an adult who wants to control an unsupervised, naïve teenager.
Cory’s slippery understanding of the power Rolo has over her—and how he’ll choose to use it—is just one way Lyon represents her consciousness as she comes of age. Lyon makes a similar move rendering Cory’s thought process: in one moment, Cory will articulate a sharp, poetic insight, and in the next there will be YA-style prose, replete with teenage dramatics. A stoned Cory:
takes a moment to be mind-blown by the beautiful junk of this late-capitalist Earth, overpopulated by a parasitic glut of violent omnivorous primates who have made an industry of scraping up the very stuff of life, repackaging it in plastic, and selling it to one another.
The reader could be swept up by this, feeling Cory’s verbose intellect to be a marker of her maturity and independence. But the same stoned Cory, just a half hour later, assumes that a waitress is looking at her and Rolo because “she knows I’m high.” Cory’s inability to read why an adult would be concerned about her and Rolo reveals the remaining innocence at her core. Lyon encourages the reader to hold this multiplicity of Corys. We sit right up against her mind, watching her experience unfold with an uncanny immediacy. Lyon writes Cory in such a compelling way that we feel entirely guided by her perception, centering her, despite any other information we receive.
But once Emer’s sections come into play, the reader realizes how much her perception and beliefs influence Cory, which again shifts Cory out of the seat of autonomy. Cory knows this better than we do. Even in her charmed first meeting with Rolo, Emer enters her mind, warning that he might kill her: “Girls are abducted, raped, and murdered every day. Girls are chopped and cubed and stowed in freezers like beef—shut up, Mom—It is a curse of hers, this difficulty separating her mother’s voice from her own internal monologue.” The reader sees Cory infused with Emer, not yet her own consciousness, her own voice. This is further reinforced by Cory’s profoundly teenage thoughts: “No, Rolo Picazo just seems kind of lonely. Lonely and funny. Lonely, funny, and sad. Okay, lonely, funny, sad, and into her, but not in a rapey-killy way. In a normal way.” To decide whether to go to his island, she weighs up his pitch, her desire to escape, her mother’s lifelong warnings, and chooses one. Cory reasons: “fear is better than boredom . . . danger trumps familiarity, the unknown is always more interesting than the known.” For a moment, Cory controls her destiny.
Cory’s attempt to gain autonomy is thwarted as the novel goes on; she’s increasingly destabilized by Rolo’s mercurial behavior toward her. He opens the first night on his island by putting his kids to bed and then offering her the drug he patented. Granadone, with a classic, pomegranate-influenced name, are “ruby-colored gel caps the size and color of ladybugs.” Rolo informs Cory that it’s “a highly effective, highly popular, highly pleasant, highly safe, frankly groundbreaking painkiller.” In this way we’re reminded, not by Cory, but by Lyon, that Rolo is her captor, her seducer. And whenever Cory gets too comfortable seeing Rolo as someone who desires her, loves her, even—she’s reminded she works for him, babysits his children. Over the course of her job, he often takes on the role of bad employer; she doesn’t have normal hours, and he’s often unclear on whether she’s working nights, working his parties, or if she’s invited. At one point she’s dunked into the cold pool of reality by an outsider. His ex-wife visits for a party and brings Cory a group of children to watch. In response to Cory’s confusion, she asks: “Did you think you were a guest?” Is Cory a guest? Who is Cory—to herself, to others, to the reader? Cory begins to acknowledge these conflicting lenses, but she can’t reconcile them:
Through one frame—gilt and driftwood, Cory imagines, embedded with sea glass—she is having the time of her life, she is free, she is adventuring, Dorothy in Technicolor, Wendy in Neverland, Alice through the looking glass. Through another—her mother’s frame, maybe, dented metal, heavy as the past—she is lost, sad, and unaccompanied, except sometimes by a wicked old man.
The reader wonders alongside Cory: who is on her side? Does she have agency? Is she a child or an adult? Is she her mother? Is she in danger, or having fun? Is she even herself?
The longer Cory is on Rolo’s island, the less clearly she is a person bound to time or selfhood. In a gorgeous bit of future tense, Cory chases Rolo’s kids around the island while the prose moves ahead of her:
Blue shadows will fall across the lawn through the rot-addled woods. The ocean will stretch out like Baba Yaga’s mirror, concealing under its glass all the death-rich muck underneath . . . while Rolo is gone . . . she will take the pills he keeps in the amber bottle in his private bathroom.
Lyon enacts a narrative move: push us forward in time, but this is also how time begins to move for Cory in her new world, as her boundaries dissolve further, thanks to the “increasingly frequent help of Granadone,” which leaves her “suspended in a kind of eternal present.” This dissolved boundary warns the reader: with no time, no identifiable body, no one to know where you are, what is your identity but what you name yourself? And if you have no identity, where is your stoplight for what can be done to “you”? Cory allows this dissolution, even desires it: “it feels right to Cory that she should be here, where inside meets outside, neither child nor adult, both caretaker and, sort of, almost, part of the family, the glue between generations.” She wonders: “what makes Cory Cory, anyhow? A name? A life? A brain? She has lost these, all of them, or compromised them beyond recognition.” Did Cory consent to this abduction, to this job, to the “love” from Rolo, if she can’t even individuate herself from anything around her? The frame blurs, the frame shifts, the frame is kaleidoscope and unstable.
Rolo becomes Cory’s only solid point who she can think in relation to—he is what still exists. And as we’ve seen, that’s endlessly unstable—he’s her captor, employer, protector, father, friend, predator. Even outside her viewpoint, he’s equally unclear. He’s Emer’s pixelated internet demon who has stolen her child—wholehearted expression of patriarchy. To his ex-wife, Cricket, he’s “been good,” and she suggests he “loves” Cory. To the world at large, he’s a central factor in the opioid crisis, merciless and unaccountable. To himself he’s a “scapegoat.” Rolo is presented in all the ways Hades has been across time, and our understanding of Cory is refigured again and again in relation to him.
Lyon makes a similar move with Emer; the shifting contexts the reader sees her in help us to better grasp Cory. When we first meet Emer, she’s on a business trip to China visiting what she calls “our farms” in Anhui that her NGO has sent “magic rice” to. The first farmer she visits (also “our farmer”) says it “does not grow,” that it is a hex, a curse, and that the way her contract with him is written is “despicable. He says he wishes he would never have signed.” This is eerily aligned with Rolo’s “legal tangles”: something they each created has backfired—causing irreversible damage in the same people they purported to “help.” The only difference is that Lyon characterizes Emer as intelligent—knowing the right things, but still acting differently. One of Emer’s immediate thoughts in relation to her “magic rice” not growing is: “[h]ow did anyone think it was a good idea to try to streamline, optimize, expand, and improve on rice, of all things—in this part of the world, of all places . . . I flush again at our colonialist wrongheadedness.” Emer’s coworker tells her, “you’ve been running around dressed head to toe in white savior drag.” Is Emer different from Rolo, his blasé talk of “helping people,” while ignoring the impact he’s had? In Lyon’s best move, she positions Emer and Rolo as frames for one another—a frame can be a mirror, even if one does not see it.
Cory’s centrality is one way Lyon pushes against Persephone’s silence, but so is the alignment of Emer and Rolo’s behavior throughout the novel. It’s a subtle critique of white supremacy and saviorism that refrains from positing Emer as a hero, complicating her impact on Cory and others. Emer often compares herself to Baba Yaga, a figure who is sometimes the hero and sometimes the villain in folktale and myth, depending on one’s interpretation. On one hand, Cory calls on Emer to save her by telepathically “pull[ing] the thread just right,” and Emer clearly articulates the imbalance and danger of Cory’s situation in relation to gender and class. On the other, Emer always thinks of Cory as “daughter of something” (“[d]aughter of beauty, daughter of sunshine, daughter of ungainly grace”). In this way, Cory is never anything without being a daughter of, first. It’s easy to see how this form of relation is stifling to Cory—why so much of her narrative is a failed attempt to individuate.
And as the novel is centrally about white characters, Lyon thinks through how they impact the world at large and how this mirrors their impact on Cory’s life. Although Emer’s narration is in first person, Lyon offers us other standpoints to view her from. When Emer thinks something like: “like a creature in a fairy tale [Cory]’s metamorphosed . . . [t]he seabird dives into the ocean, swims away: a fish. Well, let my bow and arrow become a harpoon, then. Let my harpoon become a net. Let me, her mother, be the hunter who saves her from herself,” we can see a mother consumed by grief, obsessed with where her daughter has gone. But then Emer will see her scandal on the news or talk to a coworker to explain why she’s gone MIA, saying, “[m]y daughter disappeared,” and they will swiftly reply: “[y]our adult daughter got a job. And, news flash, you lost one.” With this context, the reader sees a white woman searching for new ways to be the hero, to play God, so she can avoid accountability for her actions. Emer and Rolo are “gods”—in the form of self-interested white savior enterprises. Like Rolo describes his drug: “I still believed that I alone, my operation and none other, could heal people’s pain. I thought we’d made a miracle.” Rolo and Emer are always trying to “cure the world.” There is a kind of sick resonance between this and their respective treatment of Cory. Emer and Rolo consistently mistake—or rather, they frame—power and control as care.
In offering such a robust look at Rolo and Emer—their attempts to gain authority and dominance through saviorism and the disastrous effects they have on other people, the climate, and Cory—Lyon allows us to see them not as gods, but flawed and complex humans, who have the capacity to do irreparable harm. In this way, Lyon dislocates the reigning Hades-and-Demeter conflict of perspective on Persephone. In this, she foregrounds Cory: while Cory can’t see them, herself, or anything else clearly, and makes a blur of mistakes, we begin to understand her story—as told by her.
So it feels right that at the end of the novel, we first hear Emer’s framing: “This is how the story ends, Emer shouts, and grips her daughter tightly. This is how the story ends.” But, ultimately, Cory “senses . . . the end is for parables and fairytales,” and is able to define her own experience, getting the last word. Whatever we may think of her new trajectory—we know what’s in her mind.
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Fruit of the Dead. By Rachel Lyon. New York: Scribner, 2024. 320 pp. $28.00.
