Telephone by Percival Everett
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

Cleavage

Percival’s protagonist, Zach Wells, learns the truth behind the apparently contradictory meanings of the English verb ‘to cleave’ - both ‘to attach closely’ and ‘to separate forcefully’. After all, isn’t the world, from quantum physics to human affection, paradoxical?

“I considered that word, cleave, and wondered how it could contradict itself so cleanly, wondered if the two meanings canceled each other out, leaving nothing in its wake. Cleave.”

No one ever mentions that having children is a crap shoot, a bet with the universe using dice that are loaded in unknown ways. So we ignore the infinite possibilities for genetic mutations, recessive defects, or outright deformities and trundle on as if our power of procreation were divinely sanctioned, or at least a demonstration of some sort of control over life.

But even among the religiously minded, “The Lord giveth the and the Lord taketh away.” This shibboleth, of course, is the ultimate rationalisation for the random events of human existence, including existence itself. Even the most genetically perfect child poses enormous risks to personal mental health, parental relationships, and ultimately social well-being. The Markov chain of randomness defies reason. If God exists he is “An absentee landlord at best.”

Nevertheless an unreasoned and unreasonable fundamental optimism dominates our lives. As Zach Wells says at a particularly tragic moment. “everything now felt so hard, so real, every move an effort and a mystery, yet strangely, no move seemed as if it could be wrong.” Or could it merely be that any action didn’t make any difference in the situation. Every move had an unavoidable downside. If all tactics end in failure, can any be called ‘wrong’?

And the futility of intention and hope doesn’t just apply to children. What we think of as doing good has ramifications we can’t imagine. We listen civilly and it’s taken as incipient affection. We give constructive advice which results in personal harm. We teach and it encourages psychopaths to blossom. We marry and drive our partners into depression. And all that quite apart from the accidents and natural disasters which are accepted as normal. No surprise then that Percival uses an epigraph from Kierkegaard:

“I see it all perfectly; there are two possible situations—one can either do this or that. My honest opinion and my friendly advice is this: do it or do not do it—you will regret both.”

For everything, indeed, “transit lux, umbra permanet,” the light passes, the shadow remains. I too have lost a daughter before her death, in a manner similar to Zach Wells. Despite that, it is necessary to do good because God will punish us if we do good or not. Cleavage.

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