Monstrilio v. American Mermaid
The 2024 Tournament of Books, presented by Field Notes, is an annual battle royale among 16 of the best novels of the previous year.
MARCH 18 • OPENING ROUND
Monstrilio
v. American Mermaid
Judged by Tajja Isen
Tajja Isen (she/her) is the author of the essay collection Some of My Best Friends, named a Best Book of the Year by outlets including Electric Literature, The Globe and Mail, and CBC Books. The former editor-in-chief of Catapult magazine, she has also co-edited the anthology The World as We Knew It and edited for The Walrus, where she is currently a contributing writer. Her next book, Tough Love, is a memoir of mentorship, ambition, and obsession. She’s based in Brooklyn but is spending spring 2024 in Las Vegas as a Black Mountain Institute Shearing Fellow. Known connections to this year’s contenders: None. / tajjaisen.com
When a writer sets a novel in or near the publishing industry, I’ve come to expect a searing critique. Just look at the evidence. Luster. Severance. The Other Black Girl. Yellowface. Erasure is having a renaissance, thanks to American Fiction. These books skewer the industry’s low pay, its iffy labor practices, its cookie-cutter racial imagination. I have been so totally, gleefully poisoned by such stories that, when I picked up Julia Langbein’s American Mermaid—a novel about a white woman who publishes a book with American in the title, whose protagonist embodies various marginalized identities that the (fictional) writer may or does not share—it took me several dozen pages before I realized it is not a satire and publishing is not the villain. I was pleasantly surprised to be wrong. To peek into the mind of a rare creature: a writer with a rosy view of the book business.
Penelope Schleeman, narrator of American Mermaid, is an English teacher who writes a novel also called American Mermaid. It’s a big enough hit that Penelope, lured by the siren song of a blockbuster payday, quits her job and moves to Los Angeles to co-write the screenplay. The book that we read alternates between Penelope, miserably partying her way through a film industry she can’t stand, and her novel-within-the-novel: a mermaid, Sylvia, has been unconscionably raised as a human—one who cannot use her legs, which are (secretly!) the surgically separated remnants of her tail. Eventually, Sylvia rediscovers her mermaid nature and faces off against her evil-scientist dad and his scheme to accelerate the climate crisis. But Hollywood—unlike publishing—doesn’t have the stomach for Penelope’s feminist eco-fable. They just want to make it porny. This puts Penelope in a pickle: Movie money would pay for a preventative breast cancer surgery, but making bank means compromising on her artistic vision.
There’s another thing you should know about Penelope: She comes from money. Her father, whose politics are an undefined throw to the right of hers, could easily front her the funds, but Penelope won’t accept them. I respect a character who sticks to her principles when it’s against her own interests. But also, you can’t just drop an inherited-wealth subplot and expect the stakes to stay high. Especially because of how much Penelope loves money that doesn’t belong to her dad. It’s the one thing in LA she actually seems to like. “If I’d known it was possible to feel ethical and live like this,” she says of one host’s particularly tasteful house, “I would have tried to be rich. What a failure of vision.” On her $37,000 teaching salary, she feels morally superior to people like her father because she believes her relative scarcity makes her more authentic. But it turns out she just hadn’t seen the right kind of wealth.
It’s a juicy, provocative question: Where do our stories come from?
I was more compelled by Sylvia, whose storyline had an emotional heft that Penelope’s lacked. Her beef with her father is bloodier: He obscured her origins, severed her from her roots, and literally cut up her body without her consent, subjecting her to years of painful medical treatment. American Mermaid is smart enough to know Sylvia’s story is meatier than Penelope’s. Her sister says so: “I still wonder, looking at your basic-ass life sometimes, Where did this story about mermaids come from? I know you better than anyone, but this stuff comes from a protected part of you.”
It’s a juicy, provocative question: Where do our stories come from? And yet, I wasn’t totally sold on the novel’s proffered answer. Throughout, it insists on one-to-one comparisons between Penelope’s life and Sylvia’s. Exhibit A: daddy issues. Sylvia’s disability becomes a back spasm that Penelope sustains at yet another party. Sylvia’s lack of sexual interest in people—because mermaids come from matriarchal societies who have no use for men beyond their semen—becomes the is-she-or-isn’t-she of Penelope’s potential asexuality. By definition, whatever happens in Penelope’s life is always a faded copy of her novel. I can appreciate how this feels vital to Penelope, in that classic is-my-art-coming-to-life way. But to the reader, insisting that the frame narrative was a pale imitation of the fiction made it feel like, well, a pale imitation. I also wasn’t sure about it as an answer to Where did this story about mermaids come from? Is this all art does—gives us a safehouse to inflate our trauma, make our suffering seem more urgent, more real? Isn’t fiction more capacious than that? If the point is that the man behind the curtain is always a disappointment, fair play, I guess. But I always imagined, until the moment the curtain drew back, that the man behind it was happy, lost in the beauty and meaning of what he made.
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Like American Mermaid, Gerardo Sámano Córdova’s Monstrilio is a book about creating something that gets away from you. Its conceit is leaner than American Mermaid, which makes it quicker to summarize: A couple, Magos and Joseph, are grieving the death of their son, Santiago. Magos cuts out a part of Santiago’s lung from his corpse and nurses it to life. First, the lung becomes Monstrilio, a fur-covered blob with a giant, fang-filled mouth and an arm-tail that it uses to swing from trees as it hunts the neighborhood pets. Later, it metamorphoses into the sensitive M, a human-like boy (later man) with inconvenient appetites, who is acutely aware of existing as a manifestation of his parents’ grief.
I’ll be honest: I find it hard to get into fiction about grief.
Even though Magos intends Monstrilio as a replacement for her lost son, the family is (refreshingly) never the same. The disruption shifts their nuclear setup into queer configurations: Magos, a performance artist, has always been a little in love with Joseph’s doctor friend Lena; Joseph remarries a man; M experiments with various forms of kink on hookup apps as part of his long, doomed quest to discipline his desires. He only becomes human-like at all because Magos urges Lena to amputate his arm-tail—another bodily mutilation at the hands of a bad parent, another life ruined by being forced to pass as human; for two randomly chosen books, there are an awful lot of hyper-specific similarities. Despite the surgery, traces of Monstrilio remain. “It’s like a trick, the way I unhinge my jaw and stretch my lips all the way to my earlobes,” M narrates. “But it’s not a trick. I’m not trying to fool anyone. It feels good … I do this when I’m alone, preferably outside. At night. People would freak out if they saw.”
I’ll be honest: I find it hard to get into fiction about grief. I find it stagnant and claustrophobic in a way that probably means it’s succeeding on its own merits, even if it isn’t quite to my tastes. But in Monstrilio, Magos’s grief and the act it inspires are just jumping-off points into a dense ethical thicket of love and art and performance. Giving life to the lung, and then mutilating it into what she wants rather than what it wants to be, is itself appropriately monstrous. The delusion tears her family apart. But it’s also just the price of creation. Magos is an artist. She is lost in the illusion the whole time, even when everyone around her tries to yank back the curtain. If both books invite us to ask what art is and does, what it means when our work exceeds us and the monsters it can turn us into, I think Monstrilio gives the more compelling answer.
Looking at these books head-to-head, I probably had more fun, and was more absorbed, in the novel-within-a-novel sections of American Mermaid than I was for every moment of Monstrilio, whose simple, fable-like quality worked for me better in some sections than others. But the way I evaluate a book’s effect on me is how convincingly it executes the project it sets for itself. Monstrilio sticks to a simple conceit and commits, even past the point you think it’s going to. The image of M scrolling through the apps, desperately trying to suppress his monstrous instincts, will stay with me for a long time. So will the furred lung with a mouth full of teeth, swinging from a branch and bleeding out the cats. For those reasons, I’m going to advance Monstrilio.
Advancing:
Monstrilio
Match Commentary
with Meave Gallagher and Alana Mohamed
Alana Mohamad: I think this is an excellent matchup for the reasons Judge Isen describes.
Meave Gallagher: Completely agree. Although, I feel compelled to say that none of our books were randomly chosen or paired. I’m not in charge of any of it, but I do participate, and for me, Monstrilio is another top-tier book, while American Mermaid gave me the giggles and then fell right out of my head.
Alana: American Mermaid largely takes place in Hollywood, so there is a fun glitz to it. Penelope “miserably partying her way through a film industry she can’t stand” is a promising comedic setup, but Judge Isen sees it as also undercutting her autonomy. As Penelope mopes through parties and is seduced by wealth, Magos grows as an artist and is constantly creating: She makes Monstrilio, she makes him into M, she rips her life apart in a way Penelope does not seem willing to. Did Penelope similarly fall flat for you, too?
Meave: I was surprised that the judge didn’t mention my favorite part of American Mermaid, which was Penelope’s interactions with teenagers. She observes that “whatever happens in Penelope’s life is always a faded copy of her novel,” which she says is to American Mermaid’s detriment—to which I reply, “But the teens!” Penelope’s appreciation of teenagers qua teenagers made the book for me.
Alana: I thought it was great that Penelope was such a keen observer of her students, while also being kind of clueless about her relationship to them. Judge Isen is critical of Penelope writing American Mermaid as a “safehouse to inflate [her] trauma,” but I think that’s exactly why I found Sylvia’s story less compelling than Penelope’s. Her IRL relationships are richer than the good vs. evil dynamic Sylvia contends with. Because of this inflation, Judge Isen is ultimately disappointed with what American Mermaid has to say about what art can do. What did you think of her assessment of both novels on this point?
Meave: I liked that Penelope’s respect for her creation (and herself?) grew as the book went on; as more surreal things happened, she seemed to care more about saving Sylvia from getting Hollywood-ed, which I thought made her stronger, rather than, as our judge says, “insisting that the frame narrative was a pale imitation of the fiction made it feel like, well, a pale imitation.” Judge Isen is quite hard on Magos, too, calling her a “bad parent” who “is lost in the illusion” and whose work “turns [her] into a monster.” I felt torn (no pun intended) about Magos. Describe her arc as Turning Monstrilio into humanoid M, using her grief about Santiago to gain international acclaim as a performance artist while she expects her non-human “child” to behave like a son and you might think, What a selfish woman. On the other hand, A mother loses her young son and, crazed with grief, magically create a monster from a piece of the weak lung that killed him, believes the monster will be happier if he appears more human and subjects the monster to surgery to help him grow more human-like, then devotes her life to caring for this human-monster as though he were her son while she processes her grief through art—isn’t that also Magos?
Alana: I agree! There is a version of this story that casts Magos as the villain, but Monstrilio gave us more to chew on.
Meave: ALANA.
Alana: Sorry! It seems like Judge Isen enjoyed the journey, however painful. Monstrilio “commits, even past the point you think it’s going to” and via Magos “tears the family apart” while Penelope doesn’t do quite enough to endanger her inherited wealth.
Meave: Penelope coming from money is something else I totally forgot about American Mermaid. Regardless, I’m so happy Judge Isen advanced Monstrilio—it was one of my favorite books of last year. I fully agree with the judge that “fiction about grief” can feel “stagnant and claustrophobic,” so I’m glad she appreciated the way Sámano Córdova expanded and complicated his story. I was worried the novel wouldn’t find its reader—always a risk in the ToB—but the aspects of Monstrilio that Judge Isen seems to have best connected with weren’t even my favorite parts. I love it when a judgment sheds light on parts of a book I hadn’t thought to appreciate as much.
Alana: Which parts of Monstrilio did Judge Isen highlight or put in perspective for you? I did not read Magos’s decision to cut off Monstrilio’s tail as straight-forwardly monstrous—at that point, aren’t all the options monstrous in one way or another?—but Judge Isen comparing it to Sylvia’s surgery pulled this into sharper focus for me.
Meave: I hadn’t thought as much about how losing a human son and gaining a human-shaped lung monster changes the love among and between the main characters before the judge cited that aspect as a highlight. Which it is!
Alana: It really does open up new ground.
Meave: Reading the judgment, I’m surprised at how defensive I felt of Magos. I wonder how deliberately Sámano Córdova presented his characters’ voices—first Magos, then Lena, Joseph, and finally M—in order to make Magos seem ever crueler. I didn’t read the judge as a total condemnation of Magos, but it did remind me that Joseph failed Monstrilio and M, too. Poor guy should’ve been allowed to live upstate with Joseph’s Uncle.
More importantly: Would you have fed the lung? I’ll never give birth, but can I predict what fucked-up shit I would do if I lost my husband, or how I would view my parent-friends’ behavior if they were in Magos’s place? I don’t know what “healthy” grieving looks like! I get the impression the judge would not have made a monster-child, but she doesn’t dwell on the inciting incident in Monstrilio, either: the death of a young child, a tragedy that must irrevocably change you.
Alana: It’s true, Monstrilio opens on a scene of grieving, and grief is the trust of the book. The questions Judge Isen asks about creation dare us to accept what we create, tail and all, which is one of the challenges of parenthood. She pictures the creator behind the curtain as “happy, lost in the beauty and meaning of what he made” while accepting “the price” of creation as delusion.
Meave: Something in me wants to argue with this assertion, but it sounds so much like the prompt for an essay I might’ve written for my comp lit degree, it’s probably best not to start. Besides, all my critical theory textbooks are across the country.
Alana: I wish you would, though! I think you could argue that Penelope is lost in the beauty of what she made, she’s just not happy about it. And is Magos, ultimately? The conversation around creation is so appealing because of the lengths she goes to. Many of us would want to, but how many of us could?
Meave: “Who would go to what extremes for their art” is a good question to end on, I think! And that’s also curtains for the opening round. Kevin?
Kevin Guilfoile: Just popping in here with an end-of-round-one Zombie update.
For those who are new to the ToB, the path to the Rooster includes a “Zombie Round.” Prior to the tourney, readers were asked to vote on their favorite books from the shortlist. After the brackets are whittled down to just two novels, the two books that were the favorites of ToB readers—from among the novels that had been eliminated—return to do battle with our presumptive finalists. From here on out, after every match we will update you on which books are currently in the running to be risen from the ranks of the dead. Of course, these contenders can change as more novels are knocked out of contention.
So, if the Zombie Round were held today, the two rigor-mortised novels would be The Bee Sting and Chain-Gang All-Stars.
That means we say goodbye for good to The Auburn Conference, Boys Weekend, Cold People, Open Throat, Big Swiss, The Shamshine Blind, What You Are Looking for Is in the Library, and American Mermaid.
The quarterfinals begin tomorrow as Blackouts by Justin Torres faces Dayswork by Chris Bachelder and Jennifer Habel. See you then!
Staff picks
This year we’re featuring some of our favorite independent businesses whose products we’ve used and loved—including some owned and operated by friends (and friends of friends)—and today we want to direct your attention to California-based Fat Gold’s olive oil.
Fat Gold is a woman-owned, independent producer of California extra virgin olive oil that just so happens to have a fiction writer—and known ToB fan—as its co-founder. (Hi, Robin.) Fat Gold sells their olive oil by the tin and by subscription; every shipment includes an informative zine. As they put it, “We think great olive oil is for everyone to use every day.” We agree—and recommend!
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