Book Review: Melissa by Jonathan Taylor

Melissa
A Novel by Jonathan Taylor
Salt Publishing, September 2015
ISBN-13: 978-1784630355
$12.99; 240pp.
Reviewed by Phillip Garland

“I don’t know, I’ll never know, in the silence you don’t know, you must go on, I can’t go on, I’ll go on.”

This famous line from Samuel Beckett’s The Unnamable could serve as a mantra for Jonathan Taylor’s Melissa. In carrying on after the death of someone we love, we grieve and make attempts to accept what has happened. But rarely do we understand the why of the matter. In this confused space between grief and resolve, the characters of Melissa push past the novel’s defining event into a region of protracted loss. For them, going on is the real story.

Melissa is essentially the story of the Combs, a family grappling with the death of their youngest daughter, Melissa, after her prolonged battle with leukemia. But it is also the story of Spark Close, their small neighborhood in Stoke-on-Trent, England. Moments after Melissa’s death, the Combs’ neighbors experience a shared musical hallucination. In a brilliantly detailed first chapter, the omniscient narration shifts nimbly between each of the residents of Spark Close as they are driven out of their homes in fright. Eventually they are swept up in a tremendous wave of jubilation bordering on the religious. One character notes that “after years of just passing one another in the street, the Spirit had descended on us all.”

This revelatory scene contrasts markedly with what follows. After the musical phenomenon subsides, the residents slowly return to their homes to take up their old hermetic ways. The Combs family, meanwhile, inexplicably unaffected by the burst of noise, is soon pitted against each other in a series of harrowing scenes. For Harry, the father, the great shame is not that Melissa has died, but that the world has continued on without her. That life goes on is an unpardonable offense. He repeatedly fails to rationalize his loss by applying the rules of musicality to his own experience: “But in real life even tragedy like that is not the end. You have to carry on afterwards, plodding away on your double basses and crap. Sometimes, all I want is for things to finish, the end, full stop.” As closure is withheld from them, the Combs both figuratively and literally move apart from one another.

The transition into isolation proves to be an apt metaphor for entropy, which Taylor uses to great effect. Like her father, Serena Combs uses music to try to understand the aftermath of her sister’s death. Of all the characters, Serena engages most directly with this conflict. In one beautifully vulnerable scene, she approaches her teacher to ask why “music builds up to these huge great climaxes, then it kind of falls to pieces—and the tunes and the instruments all sound like they’re drifting away from each other, and the energy’s draining away to nothing, and it feels really . . . cold. Do you know what I mean?” It is one of the few moments in the novel that we catch a flash of unguarded bravery.

The Combs’ familial entropy is juxtaposed with an ongoing media circus outside their home. Comprised of reporters, spiritualists, and an assortment of opportunists, this mob-like group is drawn to the neighborhood after reports of the musical phenomena spread across the country. Their presence in the novel offers only satire and distracts from the more compelling conflicts among the Combs and their neighbors.

Overall, Melissa is a fascinating portrait of family skillfully rendered through Taylor’s mournfully elegant prose. His greatest successes come through his meditations on the utility of music in approaching grief and, hopefully, learning to live with it day by day.

 
Phillip Garland’s fiction has appeared in Parcel, Vol. 1 Brooklyn, redlightbulbs, and other places. He hails from Tennessee and lives in Chicago.