‘The Enchantment of Lily Dahl’ by Siri Hustvedt
Sorry…I’ve been Siri Hustvedt-ing again, for maybe the third time since July. Actually, scratch that, I’m not sorry at all, for Siri Hustvedt is awesome and not merely in the overused, SoCal sense of the word. Her novels are unique in that they inspire awe and wonder right from the get-go, and her second, The Enchantment of Lily Dahl, is a particularly good example of this. First published in paperback form in 1997, The Enchantment of Lily Dahl is the story of a nineteen-year-old waitress and aspiring actress (named Lily Dahl) and her hometown of Webster, Minnesota. Unappealing though this may sound, Webster is one small town that just so happens to be populated by an alarming number of oddballs and eccentrics, a mix made all the more interesting by the arrival of an outsider from New York, an enigmatic outsider who has a transformative effect on our heroine.
For the titular Lily Dahl is a heroine in the traditional sense of the term. She is beautiful, independent, and never without her healthy sense of recklessness and adventure. ‘The silent count had been responsible for her eating that worm on a dare when she was eight during recess at Longfellow School, for prompting her over the cliff into the ice water of the quarry in May when she was thirteen, and for her greatest triumph - that night only four years ago when she lay down on the railroad tracks in front of an oncoming train, and then, only seconds before it hit her, rolled out of the way.' Something I certainly won’t be attempting on the east coast mainline any time soon. Lily is busy rehearsing for a role in A Midsummer Night’s Dream when she comes across Ed Shapiro, a New York-based artist who is staying just across the street from her apartment.
In addition to Ed there is Mabel Wasley, Lily’s neighbour and sometime spiritual guide. Then there are the many patrons of the Ideal Cafe, where Lily works as a waitress, and, perhaps most troubling of all, there is Martin Petersen. We are introduced to him as early as page nine: 'Lily couldn’t remember not knowing Martin Petersen. The house where Martin lived as a child and where he still lived wasn’t far from Lily’s own childhood house on the outskirts of town, and she and Martin had sometimes played together in the woods or near the creek […] In high school, Martin had kept mostly to himself, and he and Lily hadn’t talked to each other much, but she had felt connected to him anyway, and sometimes they had run into each other at the creek, where Martin fled his house to read books and be alone.' Perhaps inevitably, young Martin Petersen becomes the tragic hero of The Enchantment of Lily Dahl, though not before having a stab at being the antagonist.
Put simply, I loved The Enchantment of Lily Dahl. While many writers who have style are often lacking in substance and storytelling prowess, Siri Hustvedt has the rare distinction of being both a born storyteller and a prose stylist. I kept having to go back and reread huge chunks because Hustvedt’s hypnotic prose had me forgetting about what was going on between Lily, Martin, Ed, et al. This is anything but a criticism, however. It is but an example of how hard your brain must work when dealing with a remarkable story that is also remarkably told. Furthermore, having read both The Blindfold (Hustvedt’s first novel) and What I Loved (Hustvedt’s third and best-known novel) in recent months, reading this, her second, was fascinating as I was able to appreciate the continuation of one and the progression towards another. For example, the character of Ed Shapiro in The Enchantment of Lily Dahl reads like a less realised version of Bill Wechsler in What I Loved. It is a rare privilege to see this kind of progress in action.
OK, before I wrap up I would just like to leave you with one of my favourite passages from the final portion of the book which, for the record, has the best dénouement I’ve read since either What I Loved or Lionel Shriver’s We Need to Talk About Kevin:
'She shut her eyes and imagined Martin sitting up in his coffin and climbing out. In her mind, he was wearing his costume but then she wondered how they had dressed him. In Webster, every male corpse she had ever seen had worn a navy blue suit - her grandfather, her uncle, Mr. Deerhoeven. When she opened her eyes, she saw Pastor Carlsen untangling his vestments from Tex’s spurs. The coffin was closed.’
*Merry Christmas, by the way. Literature, like all art, never really sleeps.
This piece was originally published on alisonlaurabell.tumblr.com in December 2012.