Disappointment: A Review of The Seventh Mansion by Maryse Meijer

Everything--and I mean everything--about this book should be right up my alley, but it just does not hit, unfortunately. I wanted to like this book desperately, I cannot begin to say that enough.

The synthesis of ideas and themes is incomplete; everything drags as scenes where what is happening differs minutely but what is being said thematically is frequently the same. The formalistic changes in style are sort of experimental, but rarely have much impact and often seem more like a half-edited first draft of a Tumblr post by a particularly edgy teenager than it does a series of strictly edited deliberate choices, which is what is needed to make this kind of non-conventional style work.

The reasoning behind some of these stylistic choices is often unfathomable. Why is everything all one big paragraph? Why is dialogue neither partitioned by a line break nor notated by quotation marks? Why do we switch to the pronoun you here specifically; and what is the pattern? Why is this sentence broken up. Like. That? Why? Why any of it? The effect is a sort a stream-of-consciousness ramble--it takes a strict edit to be able to pull that off without becoming tedious, and this does not have that. But why did Meijer intend that effect? What meaning is created in deciding to aim for this effect, using these techniques, using these deviations from what is standard? Why? It contributes nothing, provides no extra meaning, no extra perspective to theme and ideas and character; and because there's a lack of modulation--everything is So. Important all the. Time--your eyes glaze over and it becomes very hard to care.

I don’t like the choice of some white American kid changing his name to a Chinese surname. You could have picked anything, Meijer, what the hell was the meaning of choosing 'Xie'? Couldn't it have been something Latin; something to explore the choice of the specific saint you chose to defile.

And on the note of that defiling--I question the decision that the two characters engaged in extremely explicit, yes artful, but explicit, sexual scenes, repeatedly, should be 14 and 15 years old. There is an appropriate way of depicting teenage sexuality, even in artistic experimental forms like this, and yes including in coming of age stories, and this is not one of them. You can age them up. Eighteen would be just fine, especially since the tutoring scenes are yet another thing that feels added in to pad what would have been a great long short story idea into 200 pages.

The theme that I found interesting was probably not the intended one. I believe the author intended something about being passionate about believing in something and doing something about it (very Sonic Adventure 2), but what I got was that Xie’s passions about things are all from an obsession with his own self-reduction and destruction stemming from depression. This is ironically very anti-vegan/radical activism, which is so not the point Meijer was going for it kind of made me laugh. Oh, also, I got this theme (and the actual ideas and themes intended) about 70 pages in and proceeded to have it narrowly expanded and just conked over the head with it over and over again. 

I should mention somewhere that reading from Xie’s perspective is absolutely insufferable in a way that is not always intentional. The highlight of the book was when Jo finally reamed him out for his bullshit.

Personal highlight: when the birch trees are introduced explicitly as an invasive species that is killing the native biome, but one of the big parts of the story is Xie trying to stop the birch trees getting cut down.

I hate to use this phrase, but it really does summarise my thoughts about this: “It insists upon itself.”

The choice to make St P’s spirit hover around just to tell Xie he’s totally chill with the defilement of his thousand year old corpse feels like a cop-out; the author getting scared of the implicit rape in the act of necrophilia. It’s disappointing, because the rape aspect is an opportunity, in fact, to explore something, have that add to your theme in whatever way you wish. You’re writing experimental horror for God’s sake. Some ideas: the insisting of our own will on the world; you could use it to explore Xie’s hypocrisy, and whether it is hypocrisy at all; the desire for a right to defile and control just one thing when Xie seems to feel like he is not allowed anything because he behaves and thinks as a martyr and a monk. But this aspect cannot be explored, because Meijer got scared of the reality that when you take away the experimental prose and the single, extremely out of place fantastical element of the horny sex ghost randomly appearing to give consent and exist entirely to service Xie’s wants--when you take that away, when you strip back this book to its core, what Meijer’s coddled vegan emo boy protagonist is doing is raping the corpse of a murdered 14 year old boy while traipsing around feeling sorry for himself.

This entire thing reads like a short story stretched out into a 200 page novella. I wish so badly to read a version of this edited with surgical precision down into a 10,000 word short story because it might have been incredible. But what I read was not that. 

The Seventh Mansion by Maryse Meijer gets 2 stars out of 5.

This is a review of The Seventh Mansion by Maryse Meijer (2020), published by Fsg Originals. ISBN 9780374298463.