In college my friends and I used to love to watch Baretta ironically and wait for Robert Blake to shake his head and say "I hate it when kids get hurt!"
"Really?," we'd laugh, "I LOVE it when kids get hurt!"
Lately, though, with a spate of summer books that focus on the deaths of children, we may need Baretta back.
Two books in particular, Anna Quindlen's Every Last One and Ayelet Waldman's Red Hook Road left me feeling more than a little played and my admittedly jumpy maternal instincts exploited. Both novels feature the wrenching, violent deaths of children and how their mothers struggle to cope. Yeah, yeah, yeah, these are well-written, sensitive and artful books but I also think both authored are by women who have written better books than these and also just know better.
They're asking a lot when they go to these terrible places.
Just as Nancy Meyers' films (As Good As it Gets, It's Complicated) are sometimes criticized as 'house porn' because of the over-the-top lush gorgeousness of the homes her heroines inhabit, I think of these and several other books as 'dead children porn.' They allow us to quietly and shamefully thrill at the details and depths of these mothers' grief as a way to ensure it won't happen to us. A not very nice mix of schadenfreud and superstitious projection to keep our own babies safe. And like regular porn, in the words of Justice Potter Stewart, I know it when I see it.
Quindlen spends a good half of Every Last One describing a family of five in fine detail only to have two of the children and the husband slaughtered by a family friend on New Year's Eve. Waldman begins Red Hook Road with a gorgeous wedding in Maine that comes to a horrific halt when the bride and groom are in a fatal car accident en route to the reception. In the first chapter. Fun stuff like that.
It can be argued that these authors, both of whom have written at length about their own experiences as mothers and their own children, are simply navigating every parents' worst nightmare for us, guiding us through the unspeakable madness and sorrow, helping us cope for that feared and psychically forbidden time when it could happen to us. But in the long run these books just don't pass that smell test.
Several other bestsellers come to mind -Chris Cleve's Little Bee and David Wroblewski's The Story of Edgar Sawtelle go boldly into the same territory of brutal betrayals and murders of children. Both left me feeling emotionally violated, even ripped off. The children are lovingly drawn; their innocence, beauty and goodness painstakingly developed, and as the terrible dread builds and you think this can't possibly happen, of course it does. It's a set up.
For me this visceral resistance to using murdered children as a plot device started with Stephen King. I used to love his books - The Shining is probably one of the scariest books of all time but I stopped reading him forever at Pet Sematary when he described in detail how a father watched his young son get hit and killed by a car. I literally threw the book across the room. Big surprise, I was pregnant at the time. Once you have children this forbidden vision - that of their death - gets secreted away in your heart - and you become fundamentally programmed to avoid that image - that reality - at every and all cost. Asking readers to go there is a very big ask.
Of course death and specifically the death of a child is a legitimate, even classic theme in literature. But I believe there should be an integrity of intent on the part of the author, an artistic legitimacy. I know this is being hugely subjective -who am I do decide when it's ok to kill the kid or not - but again, I suggest that many readers have an interior scale of emotional justice that tips out of balance when an author is committing emotional blackmail.
Roxana Robinson's Cost, which explores the steady and hopeless progress of heroin addiction on one mother's son, ends with a terrible phone call, but when that call comes, the author's skill and respect for the reader make this heart-breaking final act seemed earned. This book was about the process, not the payoff .
Local book stores often feature the latest local book club favorites, and many of these novels and memoirs describe, in tortuous detail, loss of some kind - death, divorce, disease, and other reversals of fortune. On occasion I've come to view this as the Tragedy Whore table.
I get it; vicariously reading about the devastation of someone else's family somehow spares yours. And many of these writers know that shocking, brutal loss as a theme will attract a lot of sympathetic readers, who are ready, willing and able to feel the pain. Sometimes, though, it just feels like a cheap trick. And makes me feel complicit.