Early in Lucas Rijneveld’s debut novel, The Discomfort of Evening, the narrator, Jas, and her younger sister, Hanna, make a pact to each choose “a rescuer,” someone to take them away from their “ridiculous village,” their family, even themselves. Drawing on the lessons of fairy tales, Hanna says that these rescuers must be men, because “[r]escuers are always men,” and they must be wooed, because “[y]ou always have to use your charms if you want to be rescued.” The girls’ desire for salvation has been steadily increasing for several months, ever since their brother Matthies died after falling through the ice while skating just before Christmas. The tragic loss spawned a miasma of grief that has consumed and destabilized their family, leaving the girls feeling trapped. Jas, who is 10 years old when Matthies dies, initially chooses a Dutch folk musician as her rescuer, but after a night when she imagines hanging herself from the rafters in the attic bedroom where she has been sleeping on her dead brother’s mattress, she changes her mind. In the morning, Jas tells Hanna that she has chosen the livestock veterinarian, pointing out that he’s tended to the family’s dairy cows for years, he’s “kind,” and he’s “listened to lots of hearts, thousands.”
When Jas next finds herself alone with the vet, who is helping the farm cope with a nationwide foot-and-mouth disease epidemic, he asks her whether she misses her brother. She’s moved because it’s the first time anyone has asked her, but while she reflects on that sad truth, the vet, seated on an overturned feed bucket, reaches out and grasps her leg and, squeezing her calf, adds, “You know you’re the prettiest girl I’ve ever seen?” The child feels flattered and later fantasizes about her rescuer’s stethoscope on her chest and his tongue in her mouth. The vet is flirtatious on a couple other occasions, too, but his behavior goes no further. The creepy incidents are just one facet of a novel that is teeming with unseemly, discomforting incidents.
Alarm bells about the vet’s behavior may have gotten drowned out when first reading Rijneveld’s debut, but they ring stridently in light of his audacious and astonishing latest, My Heavenly Favorite, in which a former veterinarian writes about the “obstinate summer” when he was 49 and pursued his “degenerate desires” for his “chosen one,” the 14-year old daughter of a dairy farmer. The new novel is once again translated into English by Michele Hutchison, whose stellar rendering of The Discomfort of Evening rightfully won the 2020 International Booker Prize. This latest translation, told in torrential, run-on sentences, is a towering achievement arguably even more deserving of recognition, but might get overlooked in discussions about the novel’s subject matter. The Discomfort of Evening shocked with its depictions of children indulging in suicidal ideation, salacious experimentation, and animal cruelty, but the story was told by a girl who was also often darkly quirky. My Heavenly Favorite can be as shocking as its predecessor, but is narrated by a pedophile, alternately rapturous and castigating, who details how he preys on a distraught teen desperate to be seen and understood. Writing from prison, the vet explains how in the summer of 2005 he draws the teen in, weathers her interest in boys her own age — including one of his own sons, and eventually becomes fixated on possessing her for himself. The vet exhibits a deep interest in and knowledge of the girl’s thoughts, moods, and dreams, demonstrating a genuine platonic connection that is slowly cannibalized by his predatory yearnings. He also discusses his own childhood, which was defined by physical, sexual, and psychological abuse by his mother.
There are nominal differences between the fictional worlds of Rijneveld’s first two novels, which can certainly be read independently, but it is impossible to ignore how the new book acts as an implicit sequel or companion to the first. The teen in My Heavenly Favorite is never named, but she shares much of her biography with Jas, and Rijneveld himself. The author is non-binary, and has always viewed himself as “in between.” He was named Marieke at birth, and his parents raised him as a girl. He added Lucas as a middle name in his 20s, then dropped Marieke in the past year or so. (The Discomfort of Evening was originally published under the name Marieke Lucas Rijneveld.) My Heavenly Favorite felt particularly urgent, Rijneveld says, and was “virtually written in one go. That had been in me for years, it just had to come out.” (Translation mine.) Among the many acknowledged commonalities between Rijneveld, Jas, and the teen from My Heavenly Favorite, all share a birthday, April 20, 1991, and all lost a brother in their childhood. In the new novel, the girl’s brother dies after being hit by a car when she is three years old, circumstances that mirror the loss Rijneveld experienced, an event that consumes his early writing, which “all [comes] back to the loss of my brother.”
For the teen in My Heavenly Favorite, her brother’s death is also devastating and defining, implanting an insistent fear of loss that metastasizes with every subsequent death and departure she encounters. The girl’s mother is so distraught by her son’s death that she abandons the family, leaving the girl to be raised, along with her surviving brother, by her grief-stricken father. (Hanna has no corollary in the new novel.) By the summer of 2005, this parental void has increasingly been filled by the voices of Sigmund Freud and Adolf Hilter, who act as the angel and devil on the teen’s shoulders. In the future from whence the vet is writing, his “chosen one” has become an accomplished musician, but in the timeframe of the novel, she is only dreaming of fame, “eager for the life that lay in wait beyond [her village].” She wants to shed not only her burden of loss, but the burden of her God. And most of all she wants “to free [herself] from [her] father.” The vet in My Heavenly Favorite refers to the teen as his “chosen one,” but he also seems subconsciously aware of his chosen status as rescuer, at one point recalling a fantasy that Queen Beatrix would award him “the Order of Loyalty and Merit because I would never leave your side, precious creature, and I’d be given a medal for rescuing you.” Later in the summer, as he forces a kiss on the girl, he remarks that he doesn’t deserve a medal after all, but rather “a degradation.” The rescuer has become another oppressor, a virus, a parasite.
Vulnerability in the young can be irresistible to abusers. Growing up, identity is in flux, and how you want to be seen, how you imagine yourself can be complicated and ever changing. The vet sees and uses this to his advantage, though initially his stated intentions are simply to help the teen feel seen. “[Y]ou were perfectly healthy and incredibly beguiling and I knew then I’d be the first man in your life to see you the way you wanted to be seen, as a fourteen-year-old adult, all fourteen-year-olds long to be considered more grown-up than they are, but you didn’t just want that, you behaved that way too.” He particularly exploits her uncertainty about her gender identity, how the teen is “wavering between a girl and a boy.” The teen is attracted to boys, including to some degree the vet, but she also wants to be a boy. “[N]o one could tell from the back whether you were a boy or a girl, and I thought you weren’t sure yourself.” The depth of the teen’s confusion is highlighted when the vet recalls a time he asked her who she was at that moment, “[a]nd you shrugged and said you only knew who you were when you weren’t asked.”
The teen expresses her in-between nature by maintaining, at different times, that she is a bird, a frog, and even an otter, animals that are all at home in two worlds — birds in the sky and on land, frogs and otters on the land and in water. The frog, which derives from a nickname for a boy she kisses, comes out when she herself yearns to be a boy, and her desire to have a penis, sometimes expressed by simply wanting to pee standing up, runs throughout the novel. The bird, which she inhabits most of the novel, derives from a children’s book she received soon after her brother’s death, when her “dad hadn’t uttered a single word” and “the blow of the accident was still ringing in [her] ears.” Flipping uncomprehendingly through the pages, the young child imprinted on an image of a bird lying on its back, legs up in the air. The bird is dead, but the other animals say it is just broken. Years later the teen explains to the vet, “A dead thing can’t be broken, dead is dead, nothing more. The ones left behind are broken and into a thousand pieces at that.” Another clue to the appeal of the bird can perhaps be found in The Discomfort of Evening, where on that same night when Jas imagines hanging herself in the attic, she says, “I wait there until the stairs stop creaking and then I close the curtains, try to think of my rescuer so that the oppressive feeling around my stomach disappears, making way for a longing, a longing that birds can best express.” Perhaps the appeal of birds is simply that they long to fly away.
The teen in My Heavenly Favorite is driven by her desire to fly and truly believes that she can do so. This delusion culminates in a horrific accident that may actually be a suicide attempt, one of the few times that the vet lacks additional insight into the teen’s thought process, but it arises throughout the summer, most strikingly in her contention that it was not a second plane that crashed into the World Trade Center on September 11, but rather her body: “[Y]ou told me that you had flown there that tragic September day and you’d heard the people’s screams beneath you, the sirens, and as you flew, office papers streaming out of the towers became doves of peace and you saw people launching themselves out of the windows, you heard the dull thuds of the landing bodies like bags of milk powder, and then a second plane pinned itself to the second building of the Twin Towers and you wondered whether it was a plane or whether you had flown into that building, first with your head, your torso and then the rest of your body, your feet, you thought it was all your fault.”
She is primed to take on the deaths of 9/11 not only by the lingering sorrow from her brother’s death, but by the fallout of the foot-and-mouth epidemic earlier that year, which necessitated, as detailed in The Discomfort of Evening, the culling of her family’s entire cattle stock, cows that she had helped to milk and groom. Numerous other deaths plague the teen throughout the novel. Some are local, like the infamous 1984 disappearance of 19-year-old Germa van den Boom, a cold case that was first reopened in 2001 but remains unsolved. (The girl isn’t identified in the novel, but she lived in Midden-Brabant, near where Rijneveld grew up, and the details are identical.) Others are remote, like the well-known musicians who died at age 27, a group that includes Kurt Cobain. The vet desperately wants the teen to call him Kurt because of her infatuation with the Nirvana frontman, and she does refer to him by that name throughout the novel, though it might be wishful thinking by the vet, who never reveals his real name. “I wasn’t sure at first if you were really calling me Kurt or whether I was imagining it, but let’s suppose you were actually addressing me that way, straight-forwardly and seriously.”
The abuse depicted in the novel can be tough reading, but it is often so bizarre as to be disconcertingly amusing, as when he helps her remove a dead otter’s penis so she can have it as a keepsake. When they are done with the animal, the teen climbs onto the operating table, where she clutches her arms to her sides and says, “Dissect me, Kurt.” The vet starts to kiss her, playing the scalpel along her body, but she is not interested in that and grabs the scalpel from him, stabbing it into her thigh. Unease can also be subsumed by the vet’s conflation of animals and people, as in the absolutely bonkers moment, translated with a glorious rawness by Hutchison, when he kisses the girl shortly after she has been making out with his 16-year-old son. “I leaned in over you and pressed my lips to yours, and I tasted the resistance, the same resistance I encountered when I was pressing a drench gun into a ewe’s mouth to inject anti-maggot meds and stuck the pistol’s nozzle between the molars and the cheek pouch, but you were helpless, and I forced my tongue between your lips and tasted the sweetness of your insides.”
Rather than merely observe the vet’s predation in isolation, Rijneveld explores why he is the way he is, though nothing is presented as exculpatory. Some of his trauma is recent, as with the festering memory of discovering a farmer who had hanged himself after learning that his herd would be culled due to the foot-and-mouth epidemic. But most dates back to his childhood and the nightmares that made him “a blister that kept on bursting.” His mother was a monster, making her child sleep in the pigsty one night and climbing into bed with him the next, telling him “how dirty and sinful I was as she touched me.” By age 16, his “body and soul were so corrupted that I no longer knew whether I wanted to murder or worship my mother.” Her abuse stunted his growth. “I could never love women because I had never become a man.” He admits to having “desired several children” before his “chosen one,” but he never acted on those other desires. And yet the vet is not trying to expiate himself. “I would rather you hate me, feel a profound disgust when you think about me, but I will describe [the abuses] all the same in order to understand myself better, because I never had the chance, or the time or the space, to understand myself, to see where the crack first appeared.”
Though My Heavenly Favorite talks about the Harry Potter books, Roald Dahl, and films like Scarface and Dogville, it is a title never mentioned — Nabokov’s Lolita — that will surely feature in many conversations about the novel. Rijneveld might even be tempting such comparisons by having the vet use the phrase “fire of my loins” on two occasions. And yet substantively, I’m not sure the two great novels have much in common besides their predatory narrators. The vet evinces a sincere interest in the interiority of the teen, an interest that is recognized and often appreciated, which is something that Dolores Haze rarely feels toward Humbert Humbert. And Rijneveld endows the vet with an honest introspection that Nabokov’s White Widowed Male utterly lacks. Also as uncomfortable and perverse as it might be, for most of the summer, the vet and the teen have a mutual interest in each other, though its degree and desires differ. Rijneveld highlighted this reciprocal relationship in November 2020, shortly after My Heavenly Favorite was published in Dutch, when he said that the vet and the teen “approach each other […] then develop an obsessive fascination for each other.” Indeed the abuse only comes to light because the girl sees nothing abnormal about many of their interactions, on one occasion nonchalantly telling her friend’s mom that she sometimes kissed the vet. She expects “applause, a pat on the shoulder,” but instead gets told, by “worried eyes,” that it is not okay. The vet knows the girl has a distorted perception of their relationship, but clings to it anyway. “[E]veryone responded with shock to the idea of you and me, and slowly you realized that it might not be as normal as you’d thought the whole time.”
Many critics have highlighted the current ubiquity of the trauma plot, which, when coupled with the prominence of autofiction, results in a lot of artists processing some degree of trauma through their art. Rijneveld’s novels certainly don’t constitute autofiction, but given their autobiographical verisimilitude, it is probably safe to assume there are elements of a disturbing truth in My Heavenly Favorite. Choosing to address those strains by inhabiting the mind of a reflective abuser with a virtually direct line to the thoughts and inner turmoil of the abused is a fascinating and bold new take on a storyline that is all too often recycled without enhancement. Rijneveld has said that after reading The Discomfort of Evening, some people would ask him who the vet was meant to be. He didn’t know, he said, not until he wrote the first chapter of My Heavenly Favorite. Near the end of the new novel, the teen texts the vet a quote from Stephen King’s It, which they saw together early in the summer. “Maybe, in the end, it’s the voice that tells the stories more than the stories themselves that matters.” In the end, it’s unimportant to everyone but Rijneveld whether or not there really was “a vet” in his past, what’s important is that there’s a Rijneveld now. With his first two powerhouse novels, the author has demonstrated that it’s his voice that matters immensely.
[Published by Graywolf Press on March 5, 2024, 288 pages, $28.00 US hardcover]