You get Night Film by Marisha Pessl, a novel that weirdly has been heralded as original while feeling as though it was simply cobbled together to get the highest possible SEO.
Eurydice Messas’s M_SS_NG G_RL makes passing mention of Night Film as being part of Messas’s theoretical “missing girl” tradition. It was this connection that led me to pick up the novel. I was quite prepared to love it just to spite Messas’s take on it, but kept finding that the elements of the novel fit into Messas’s theory as neatly as the cylinders in a safe lock rolling into place. (Pessl’s a big fan of the elaborate metaphor, so it’s difficult not to be mimetic in talking about her work.)
The girl is dead from the outset — this might be the only complication to applying Messas’s theory. The body of Ashley Cordova, owner of a distinctive red coat that somehow every fucking person in New York remembers, is found in the first chapter of the novel, an apparent suicide. Scott McGrath, hardened, disgraced journalist, is working with two improbable sidekicks to piece together the details of the last few weeks of Ashley’s life—and by extension, to get an exclusive on her reclusive filmmaker father, who might be a pederast, might be nuts, might be dead, might be a witch, might have been killing children to free his daughter from an ancient Satanic curse, might be the same person as his assistant, and so on.
McGrath’s missing-girl chase (he and his sidekicks pretend to their witnesses that Ashley’s a friend who’s simply missing, rather than a body in the morgue) leads him out of the doldrums of his pathetic life into surreal worlds that blend fact and fiction. McGrath is Orpheus—the talented hero—following Eurydice (here, Ashley, a chick he never fucking knew) into the underworld. That step into unreality is quite literal in a few places—first, at the sex club, Oubliette (“forgotten place”):
It was a party. And yet the floor—black-and-white geometric inlaid tiles—rippled like a sea. It spanned an immense circular atrium, ringed with Corinthian pillars, yet there was no ceiling, just a bright blue cloud-filled sky. How in the hell was it a perfect summer day in here? In the distance, beyond stone arches covered in ivy and dark doorways leading down dirt paths, there was a luscious bloom-filled garden where stone Greek statues reclined in the sun….As my eyes madly searched for some semblance of reality, my mind short-circuited, both entranced and trying to form some rational conclusion as to what the hell it was….All of it was painted, photorealist trompe l’oeil of such detail and beauty, in the dimmed amber light it was all somehow alive, thriving.
Next, he finds himself trapped in a labyrinth of sets from the filmmaker’s darkest films, sets that have such depth of authenticity that he begins to wonder whether the films were fiction at all.
“I’m in one.”
“Excuse me?”
“I think I’m inside a Cordova film. One of his narratives. And it’s not over.”
Throughout the novel, Ashley Cordova is the driving force but never takes on the feeling of an actual character. She’s a mythologically talented musician (an intentional flip on the Orpheus story, or am I just trapped in that frame now?), she’s possibly cursed, possibly insane, possibly controlled by an abusive family. Everything is about her, but she’s rendered an object.
I don’t think that this one novel proves Eurydice Messas’s theory about the “missing girl” phenomenon true — how could a single example do that, anyway? It is nonetheless interesting to see how a writer can backslide into every possible trope if she’s not vigilant.
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