It might seem perverse to have escaped into murder mysteries at a time when people were suddenly dying all around me, but Christie offered deaths that were orderly and manageable. Her murders are committed in midcentury vicarages and hamlets with names like Chipping Cleghorn and Nether Mickford. On the whole, the closest people come to dying of illness is strychnine poisoning, and the only communicable disease that matters is a lust for dispatching one’s neighbors with their own scarves. Her books are basically fairy tales that happen to have a lot of dead people in them.
Critics have been pondering how to move forward at a time when artists and artistic institutions have been struggling to survive and audiences have fallen out of the habit of leaving the house. Equally daunting is the loss of shared values and traditions. Conflict has fractured our ideal of the collective. Even those classics representing the apogee of aesthetic and moral imagination are considered suspect.
In the midst of the chaos that I was pretty sure might result in our tragic deaths, I pulled out a piece of paper and wrote a guest list for my funeral. Who would come? Who would cry? What would they say? Would anyone confess to secretly always loving me? At the very least, it was a distracting activity.
With its endorsement of a magical text as more cathartic than any mommy memoir, “Nightbitch” makes the case for itself, and for fiction that expands motherhood into new, surreal dimensions. I’ve seen myself in all the clever, recondite novels of beleaguered mothers. The moaning and groaning, the searching and yearning are real. Yoder sees a new way into the baser kinks of our animal selves, the ineffable bodily transformation of a woman into a mother. What is fiction for, if not blowing life up into the freakish myth it appears to be?
With this new novel, El Akkad implicitly acknowledges that it’s not necessary to look so far into the future to see conflicts that destroy whole societies and send helpless refugees swarming in desperation. Nothing I’ve read before has given me such a visceral sense of the grisly predicament confronted by millions of people expelled from their homes by conflict and climate change.