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The Modern and the Mythic Clash in Victor LaValle’s The Changeling
Apollo Kagwa is a book buyer, one of the few black men in the five boroughs to ply the trade. The child of a single mother (his recollection of his mysterious, absent father is murky at best), Apollo is growing ever more anxious for the birth of his first child with his wife Emma, a librarian. As the only son of his mother and an absent father, and spouse to a woman he loves and doesn’t want to lose, Apollo constantly feels as though he has to prove himself—both to himself, and to a country that has certain expectations for African-American men. When the child finally enters the world (born, of course, on a stalled A Train in the middle of the night), Apollo throws himself into caring for the boy, Brian, to prove he can be the man his father never was.
At first, Apollo and Emma are getting by, utterly exhausted by their love for the boy. But then, Emma stops acting like herself. She’s hostile toward Brian, saying he isn’t a child at all. She accuses Apollo of sending her strange photos of him, even when Apollo is in frame. One night, Apollo finds himself handcuffed to a radiator, and is left helpless as Emma murders their son in the other room. From that moment, Apollo finds himself in a new and terrible world, one in which the person he loved most destroyed the person the made together. Except Emma may not have been wrong—and she may not have fled New York, as the news has been claiming.
It would spoil to much to reveal where LaValle takes the story next, but from the moment Apollo wakes up handcuffed, this stops being a realistic depiction of the life of a striving, stressed-out new parent in modern-day New York City, and becomes something deeper, mythic, more primal, mythic. Apollo finds himself thrust into a strange reality and a hidden history that’s been lurking just below his feet for his entire life. And that is where he’ll find Emma, who has been secreted away by those sympathetic to what’s happening to her. And maybe, just maybe, that new world hides the secret of what happened to their son.
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Victor LaValle is a man of many talents. Already recognized for his strange, genre-leaning literary novels, he took his career in dark direction with last year’s novella The Ballad of Black Tom, a retelling of a the H.P. Lovecraft mythos through the lens of a black man in the 1920s. The Changeling is similarly horrific considertion of race in America—but it’s also oddly heartwarming, an intricate tale of fatherhood and childhood, and a consideration of how technology has warped us, and how the ways of modernity clash with the rules of myth.
This novel is a kaleidoscope—every time I turn it in the light, a new facet is revealed. It is about New York, and the strange, beautiful, sometimes rancid magic that exists there. It is about the life of a black man who feels he must constantly work to be everything to everybody, and the tensions and aggressions that whisper around every corner. It is about finding yourself in a fairy tale and working out the rules as you go, wary of thorns and stones in your path. It is about how technology and the internet have enabled the worst among us to do the most harm. It is about parenthood and love, asking whether the awful things we do to each other can be forgiven, and a life rebuilt. And it is about stories—what we bring to them and what we take from them.
Combining myth and modernity into something beautiful and horrifying in equal measure, The Changeling is another triumph for a truly gifted writer. Make it your next subway read; I think Apollo and Emma would really like that.
The Changeling is available now.