“I’M HAVING A hard time keeping track of everything — what should cause dread, and what shouldn’t,” claims Tuck, the protagonist of Meghan Gilliss’s gorgeous and formally innovative debut novel, Lungfish. Facing a range of natural and manmade dangers, Tuck treats everything, from tides to emails, with a penetrating attention diluted by hunger and exhaustion.
Tuck is not new to this sort of stress. Her mother left the family when Tuck was a child, and her father left her alone with her younger brother Conrad while she was in high school. This neglect and abandonment forced Tuck to become resourceful at an early age and perhaps informs her fervent desire to maintain her own family with husband Paul and daughter Agnes at all costs.
A week after Tuck’s grandmother dies, Paul proposes that they move to an uninhabited island off the coast of Maine. Her grandmother — also named Agnes — lived there, and it was Tuck’s favorite place, though she has not set foot there since she was 15. It is easier to accept Paul’s reasoning — “You’re unhappy. I miss you.” — than to question his frequent absences and their rejected credit cards. So, they take what can fit in the car and leave Pittsburgh, eager to spend time on the island until it becomes too cold or her late grandmother’s executor finds out, whichever comes first.
The island is meant to offer a pause, allowing Tuck to spend time with Agnes while Paul gets a new job. As they learn what it is like to live outside of a city, they can save up to buy their own place in the country. During the day, after Paul leaves for work, Agnes and Tuck explore the island, consulting field guides to name the plants and wildlife they encounter: chanterelles, eelgrass, jackknife clams, hawkweed. Adapting easily, Agnes blossoms in the natural environment, propelled by curiosity and wonder. While they wait for Paul’s return, they consume their meager reserves: brown bread, cheese, a pickle. Despite his promise to shop for groceries on the mainland, Paul returns only with things that can be purchased at a gas station: graham crackers, peanut butter, instant noodles.
After about two weeks on the island, Tuck finds a hidden cache of 82 plastic bags crammed with kratom, an herbal substance with stimulant and hallucinogenic properties. Despite the fact that there is no such thing as kratom withdrawal, Paul, once he stops going to the mainland, begins to experience severe physical symptoms. He shakes and chatters and screams in the night. Rather than question what is happening to him, Tuck and Agnes spend their days gathering sustenance on the island, tossing everything that can be recycled into bags to bring to the store for cash. On the mainland, they use a computer in the library to hunt for jobs and apartments. One day, while searching through her grandmother’s house, Tuck finds her father’s old money-making scheme, a kit to make silly bumper stickers, which she tries to sell to consignment stores. A complete reversal of position has taken place, with Paul sequestered on the tiny island while Tuck is now responsible for the family’s maintenance and survival. They eat rotisserie chicken. They wait for emails from the executor or from her father. Tuck googles squatter’s rights in Maine.
They supplement their meals with what is safe to eat around them. Tuck boils green crabs, devil’s apron, and bladder wrack. Once Paul manages to get clean, he begins to help a middle-aged woman named Sharon pull lobster traps. Tuck makes Paul promise that he will never leave the island and that he will give Tuck all of his earnings. For 10 hours a day, he helps Sharon, bringing home scrawny lobsters missing legs. Most importantly, he brings home cash. For a time, it seems that they might be able to afford an apartment by winter. However, with the changes of the weather, the daily cash intake either swells or shrinks. Days go by when they don’t collect at all, and a familiar fear greets Tuck.
Occasionally, Agnes goes out with Paul and Sharon, and Tuck soon discovers that they bring the lobsters to a place on the mainland called “the pound.” She realizes that Paul did not keep his promise to remain on the island. Soon other revelations about her husband begin to shake Tuck out of her torpor, and the fragile family, so long barely holding it together, finally begins to fall apart.
Gilliss evokes the landscape and ecology of the island with a naturalist’s loving eye, yet beneath the surface harmony runs an undercurrent of imminent disaster. Again and again, we are given examples of how danger and death are inherent in motherhood. Fishermen bleach the eggs off lobsters in order to make a profit. Tuck dreams of aborted foals. Green crabs from Nova Scotia, aggravated by the warmer waters, eat baby mussels when their shells are penetrable. Nature offers Tuck a brilliant illustration of how death stalks the young, how danger and caretaking are never far from each other.
Yet Gilliss also shows how Tuck uses natural survival strategies to endure her husband’s addiction. Lungfish survive droughts by coating themselves in mud and sinking deep into hibernation; when the mud eventually cracks in the sun, they resume their normal life. Similarly, Tuck seals herself off to survive the inexplicable. How does she raise a child when her own experience of parental care led only to abandonment? How does she preserve her family under increasingly tumultuous conditions? As Tuck muses, “Isn’t there room for us to burrow into the word [“missing”], on our hands and knees, making the right tunnels that end, each one of them, at nothing?”
In brilliant and evocative prose, Gilliss asks what we are willing to hibernate through. Lungfish can survive without eating for three and a half years. How long can Tuck survive without facing the reality of her circumstances? It takes the first reliable love in Tuck’s life, her young daughter Agnes, to shake her into action and allow her to escape the destructive patterns of her family’s past.
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Amanda Paige Inman is a 2022 Lambda fellow living in New York. She attended both the Tin House Summer Workshop and the Bread Loaf Environmental Writers’ Conference. You can read more of her work at AmandaPaigeInman.com.
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