FRUIT OF THE DEAD, by Rachel Lyon
Quick: What do Edith Wharton, Alfred Lord Tennyson, Geoffrey Chaucer and the Australian experimental rock duo Dead Can Dance have in common? Answer: All have been inspired by the tale of Persephone, Demeter and Hades. The art resulting from this inspiration has ranged from prose to poetry to haunting darkwave jams.
Joining these luminaries (and still others, Ezra Pound and Dante Gabriel Rossetti among them) is Rachel Lyon, whose second novel, “Fruit of the Dead,” turns Persephone into a pink-haired slacker and Hades into a hybrid of Jeffrey Epstein and Richard Sackler.
As with any story that has been around for thousands of years, there are many versions of the origin myth. Lyon’s chapter titles reproduce lines from Hugh G. Evelyn-White’s translation of the Homeric hymn to Demeter, which is a superb blueprint to follow.
In case you’re dusty on anonymous poems of the seventh century B.C., the hymn goes like this: A young and gorgeous Persephone is flouncing around a meadow when she spots a narcissus flower. Leaning over to pluck the blossom, she’s startled when the earth yawns open and Hades, god of the underworld, pops out like Freddy Krueger. He abducts Persephone. The girl’s mother, Demeter, wanders the earth in a rage searching for her lost daughter. (I’m skipping the hymn’s B and C plots, as well as its many descriptions of hairdos and bosoms.)
Hades, meanwhile, tricks or coaxes his abductee into eating a pomegranate seed. When Demeter reunites with her daughter after a wearying journey, Persephone admits to swallowing the magic fruit. Terrible mistake. By a mechanism not elucidated in the text, the pomegranate gaffe means that Hades gets to keep Persephone as his bride for one-third of each year, while the rest of the time she is permitted to rejoin her mother in Olympus.
In Lyon’s capable update, Persephone becomes Cory Ansel, a recent high school graduate who has been accepted to zero colleges and is working as a camp counselor to kill time until her next move. Demeter — the goddess of grain — becomes Emer Ansel, an executive at an agricultural NGO. Hades is Rolo Picazo, the billionaire C.E.O. of a pharmaceutical company that manufactures a drug similar to OxyContin.
On the last night of camp, Cory smokes weed with her fellow counselors and experiences wonderment about the human brain — a “corrugated ball of tender muck, synapses snapping like microscopic firecrackers,” in one of Lyon’s more bedazzled sentences. The philosophizing is interrupted when Rolo, who has come to fetch his son, invites Cory to dinner.
In a span of minutes the older man displays a United Nations’ worth of flags, all of them red. First he asks Cory if she’s a model. Then he insists on hand-feeding her a forkful of bacon. Finally he offers her a lucrative and ill-defined job contingent upon the immediate signing of an NDA. Run, Cory, run!
Cory does not run. Instead, she e-signs the NDA at the dinner table and allows herself to be spirited to a private island called Little Île des Bienheureux — Island of the Blessed — where the living is easy, the cellphone service spotty and the Wi-Fi seemingly absent. Rolo keeps on hand a supply of his company’s star product, a sustained-release painkiller with euphoric effects, and generously mixes them into cocktails for Cory to sip by the pool. When she asks if the painkiller is addictive, he shruggily tells her that people can get addicted to anything — “sex, alcohol, chocolate, video games, you name it.”
Cory accepts this nonresponse. She’s a bit slow when it comes to connecting causes with effects, a bit too quick to reach for a cliché when interpreting experience. In other words, hardly a scintillating intellect. Fiction is so crammed with precocious teenagers that Cory’s photorealistic ordinariness is somewhat refreshing, and it makes Rolo’s pursuit of her all the slimier. Lyon doesn’t gild the relationship with poetic notions about two kindred souls straining to bridge an age gap. Cory has youth and beauty; Rolo has cash and a sex drive. It’s a transaction as old as time.
Chapters jump between Cory and her mother, with Cory’s sections written in a close third person and Emer’s in the first person. Even though the reader is given direct access, literarily speaking, to Emer’s maternal wrath, the character never comes to life. She’s too much a cartoon of progressive hypocrisy. After 20 years helming a do-gooder organization, Emer is shocked (shocked!) to discover that their proprietary strain of blight-resistant rice not only fails to grow, but seems to destroy every inch of paddy it touches. Emer self-soothes by ruminating masochistically on the “colonialist wrongheadedness” of her job and listening to guided meditations.
The Homeric hymn concludes with all parties committing to a tolerable sacrifice: Nobody triumphs, everybody compromises, Persephone grows up. It is difficult (if titillating) to imagine a contemporary American edition that would go full Greek, ending with Emer and Rolo agreeing, like Demeter and Hades, to treat the contested adolescent as a timeshare. Lyon doesn’t go that route. Instead, she twists the tale just enough to needle our conceptions of coercion and desire without quite defying them.
FRUIT OF THE DEAD | By Rachel Lyon | Scribner | 320 pp. | $28
