A Greek Myth of Coercion, Retold
Fruit of the Dead, a second novel from Rachel Lyon (Scribner, $28) is a luscious and enveloping retelling of the Greek myth of Persephone and Demeter. Demeter famously searches for her daughter, Persephone, lured and abducted into Hades’ underworld.
The myth, like Lyon’s novel, is a tale of coercion and loss of agency. Lyon’s protagonist Cory is an 18-year-old camp counselor, beautiful and gangly at 5’11”. On her last day of camp, she meets Rolo Pizolo, entitled and hedonistic CEO of a pharmaceutical company under investigation for a groundbreaking painkiller. Rolo, “big bellied but elegant” offers Cory $20,000 to be his children’s nanny on his private island. Cory arrives, is asked to sign a non-disclosure agreement, and discovers she has ample access to opioids but not to the internet. She registers Rolo’s thinly-veiled sexual interest in her with passive discomfort, only vaguely aware that her compliance is part of the deal they’ve made.
The story is told in two narrative voices: those of Cory and her mother. Cory’s chapters, told in third person, are decadent, sensual and engrossing. We watch her fall asleep, drunk and high, in a wet field; she wakes to see “the sun stream through, illuminating countless jewel-like drops suspended in grass.” Meanwhile her mother, Emer, speaks in the first person, and her chapters are devoid of pleasure. Emer searches for her daughter with an anxious brand of outraged determination that reads to this millennial reader like an accidental cliche of a perpetually high-strung Baby Boomer.
The novel does not always let us see the deep relationship between mother and daughter that drives Emer’s frantic searching. But Lyon excels in her delicate, nuanced exploration of power dynamics between Cory and Rolo. This is perhaps the best depiction I’ve read of the experience of being a caregiver for other people’s children. Lyon aptly describes the discomfort of bearing witness to other people’s lives while your own feels flimsy and is still in formation. While Rolo has drinks with his ex-wife, Cory “hesitates at the door, unsure whether she is welcome.”
Although the novel has few references to Cory’s Jewishness, “‘We’re sort of Jewish,’ she says. ‘Not super Jewish…’” The inclusion of this detail underlines her position as someone who belongs to a people visible, yet often on the fringes of culture.
In one of the novel’s most compelling chapters, Cory attends her boss’s party, where she continues to play the role of marginalized observer on the fringes of a wealthy world to which she is merely adjacent, though its daily tasks consume her. Lyon nails Cory’s self-consciousness as an outsider and as a young woman, and the ambiguous state of being both hidden and exposed.
While trying on the dress she will wear she looks at herself in the mirror and “Opposing thoughts nag at her simultaneously: that she wants Rolo to want her and that she wishes he’d never look at her again.” Here Lyon pinpoints Cory’s youth and awkwardness in the very moments she is sized up and sexualized by a leering boss who’s at once kind and domineering.
In light of the recent backlash to #MeToo, we need more stories like this one about the feelings of young women. It is clearer than ever that most of us remain clueless about the mechanisms of sexual exploitation and abuse—how power dynamics often render enthusiastic consent impossible. Lyon conveys these realistically and convincingly, balancing seductive detail and its highly disturbing emotional resonance.
Shayna Goodman is a writer in New York City.
