Still Life with Tornado
A.S. King
Dessine moi une tornade!
When the pilot first meets The Little Prince, the Prince tells him,
Dessine-moi un mouton!
(Draw me a sheep!) The pilot makes a few clumsy sheep drawings, only to be mocked by the Prince. Finally, the pilot draws a box, and tells the Prince the sheep is in the box. The Prince is delighted with this sheep drawing.
I thought of The Little Prince immediately on reading, on page 1 of Still Life with Tornado,
Two weeks ago Carmen ... drew a tornado... Carmen said that the sketch was not of a tornado, but everything it contained. All I saw was flying, churning dust. She said there was a car in there. She said a family pet was in there. A wagon wheel. Broken pieces of a house. A quart of milk. Photo albums. A box of stale corn flakes.
Carmen is only a minor character in Still Life with Tornado. The story is narrated in the first person by Sarah. (Sarah's mother Helen also narrates some chapters.) I got off to a rocky start with Sarah. She was obnoxious and shallow, not interesting at all. However, as I read on, I realized that that wasn't Sarah I met in those first few pages -- it was the tornado -- the box inside which Sarah and all the things of which Sarah is composed lay hidden. Still Life with Tornado is the gradual revelation of all that's inside the tornado.
As Sarah herself later writes,
I tell the truth slowly. I think that’s how the truth shows up sometimes. Slowly.
That's the substance of the book -- the slow showing up the the truth inside Sarah's tornado. When I finally got to know Sarah, I liked her a lot. She's strong and creative (although a little too concerned about what is "art"). Like many of the best books, this one is a simple story wrapped up in a superficial, more complicated one. The plot concerns the things that happened to Sarah and her family, and there's a lot of event there. But the real story is about the tornadoes.
Now, if you've read the publisher's blurb, you already know that that complicated outer story involves a broken family and abuse, "After decades of staying together 'for the kids' and building a family on a foundation of lies and domestic violence, Sarah's parents have reached the end." In fact, other reviews say that this is a book about abuse.
Well, it is and it isn't. There is no question that the abuse story (as well as a school story that is less horrific but equally important to Sarah) makes up most of the complicated outer plot. But it wasn't essential to the plot -- in the following sense -- this book could have been written with completely different sorts of problems making up the outer plot. For instance, in his autobiography Mark Twain tells of how as a boy he embarrassed himself in front of three girls, and how the memory tormented him. Still Life with Tornado could have been written about Mark Twain's tornado, and that event might have been one of the things inside it.
If you want to read this as a book about coping with abuse and trauma -- good! It is that! It's also bigger than that -- it's about the tornado. I have to guess that King chose the title to tell us so. You take from it what you find in it.