They’re Going To Love You, by Meg Howrey

Emerging from endarkenment into enlightenment.

Can one categorize They’re Going to Love You as a “coming of age” novel? The protagonist, Carlisle, confronts a plethora of obstacles as she progresses toward womanhood and occasionally grasps a truth of one kind or another. But that genre may not be a perfect fit because in many respects the plot is retrospective; it doesn’t move through a typical journey of angst and discovery to a concluding “aha” moment. Instead, Carlisle’s narration moves back and forward in time, through glimpses of perspective that don’t so much lead to a conclusion as they create a dance that a reader can experience through Meg Howrey’s beautiful use of metaphor and imagery. Said another way, Carlisle is not similar to Holden Caufield, who starts his story at the end and then marches through a bittersweet, although flat, narrative of how he got there. Instead she skirts around a single incident that occurs when she is twenty-four years old. Howrey craftily allows her narration to drop only hints about that incident until midway through the book. And Carlisle is a far more complex character than those found in the typical, modern coming of age efforts, which are often too much saturated with teenage angst. If the novel is a coming of age one, Carlisle shares a stage with Scout Finch.

Carlisle’s story begins with a view of dancers standing in fifth position, inviting the reader to “Feel what I feel” and “See what I see.” But she isn’t actually there to see it. What she’s conveying is a part of a story told to her. So the reader is asked to “Imagine what I imagine,” as she introduces an antagonist, Alex. It’s a very complex beginning, impossible to figure out really, until one is well into the story. James, a second antagonist, is the one telling Carlisle about Alex, who must be imagined because she hasn’t met Alex yet. Although told in the first few pages of the novel, the event described actually occurs in the middle of the story’s chronology, and the next chapter will jump forward to a point near its end. As the novel continues, Carlisle’s narration slides back and forth in time, randomly it seems at first, to entwine the plot with an often disheartening revelation of herself. Howrey brilliantly paces the narrative by way of these juxtapositions of events and revelation, bringing Carlisle to life by allowing the reader to witness her subconscious monologue. And at the end of the story, after the feeling, seeing, and imagining, Carlisle asks the reader to “remember what I remember.”

Carlisle is a far more developed and multi-dimensioned character than Kate Crane and Luke Prescott, the author’s protagonists in her previous novels. Waves of insight push over her at times, but just as frequently she is desperate to understand. She is at one moment flighty, another moment serious, and a lot of time just insecure. That is no surprise in her teenage years, when her father buys her a dress that is silky with bright stripes and she observes, “I’m not the girl that would wear that, look good in that. I put it on and immediately feel fantastic. Whatever girl this dress is right for, I want to be her.” These kinds of observations replay themselves over the later years, particularly as she arrives in New York in 2016, for what might be a reconciliation, when she feels “disoriented, in between cities, decades, versions of myself.” She is forty-three years old. Over the previous nineteen years she has repeatedly told herself versions of the story that would lead to this trip to New York. Just before leaving on the trip, she is working on a dance and thinks that “the past gets caught in the lungs, the joints, the interstitial tissues of our bodies. It was part of the dance I was making today. A waltz with time, with oneself. With anger. With shame. With love?” This is a recurring struggle for Carlisle, these feelings of failure, in connection with both the Bank Street incident and her ballet career, and her attempts at rationalization. She believes that she has “failed at both. But I’m not that girl anymore and her dreams are no longer my dreams. Why should I feel like I failed her? I’m not that girl anymore. Oh, she’s still there.” Howrey doesn’t create a precisely constructed history for Carlisle. Nor is her psychology linear; her behavior and thoughts don’t often make sense. That would’ve caused the novel to succumb to a common fallacy in most modern novels, that a life always has coherence.

They’re Going To Love You is set in the world of dance, but to say that it is about dance does the novel a disservice. Dance is merely Howrey’s backdrop for her presentation of Carlisle’s journey through the novel’s chronology, during which she makes her mistakes and then, metaphorically, comes to a ceasefire in her battle for atonement she believes she must achieve. Carlisle is commissioned to choreograph a new version of The Firebird, a version in her mind that is not a fairy tale, but “one about power and freedom, the gaining of it, the loss of it, the trades you make for it.” It is given no more definition than that in the novel but a reader can certainly imagine how the struggles during Carlisle’s life are wedged into her vision for the ballet. And Howrey then employs another turn of chronology, in which Carlisle, performing the literary equivalent of a battlement fondu, presents what will happen, how her version of The Firebird will be successful, how closure will come at Bank Street, and how she will come to terms with “All this wreckage. All this gorgeous, unrepeatable wreckage. Life.”

Like many ballets, Howrey presents the novel’s plot in movements, through which Carlisle plunges into endarkenment, most of which is her own making, and emerges into enlightenment. The term “containment” appears in the novel at times, perhaps a nod toward a combination of particular ballet positions, but also a reference to a recurring theme in the novel. “Not every movement needs to go out into the world. We can keep some for ourselves. Contained. Powerful.” And in a larger context it becomes a failure of containment, or restraint at one time, that highlights Carlisle’s three relationships during the story, her metaphorical pas de deux with each of James, Alex and Isabel. With these dances Howrey develops Carlisle’s character and place milestones for the plot. The recollections are a brilliant way to pace Carlisle’s movement toward reconciliation, not unlike the manner in which Prince Ivan is led to the egg that holds Kashchey’s soul. Arguably, a reader could find a fourth pas de deux with Carlisle and her father, but that seems a bit too contrived and a forced coherence for her life. If there is a father-child pas de deux in the novel, it is between James and Alex, something suggested subtly by Howrey’s elegant prose.

With They’re Going To Love You Howrey takes a step, perhaps a leap, toward literary virtuosoship. The author’s prose seamlessly slides back and forth between folksy simplicity and chromatic outburst, often leaving the reader gasping for air. And the elasticity in the plot’s chronology sometimes produces moments of startlement, like those that come after an unexpected lightning bolt. The finale arrives in a sweet melody created with the heroine’s previsional observations. One can compare the novel to a symphony or a ballet, but in the end They’re Going to Love You stands in its own position as a fine novel.