Trip
“I was more a trampoline park kind of mom.” So said my extremely awesome + adventurous friend this weekend when we were somewhere where it seemed like it would be utterly exhausting — albeit très hip — to have a kid with you. I loved her even more for that comment. You gotta bend when you have kids — it doesn’t mean you’ve forfeited your entire being.
I struggle with novels featuring parents who can’t — or won’t — do this bending. There’s a character type who is so self-absorbed and runs from anything that makes them look like, horrors, a parent that irks me. And if a character is written this way with the intent of provoking sympathy, it really makes me want to like…jump on a trampoline out of frustration.
This was my initial reaction to Trip by Amie Barrodale. And I’m so curious if Barrodale wrote Sandra and Vic — parents to a son named Trip — with compassion or annoyance in mind. In other words, did the author like her characters?
This one’s got a compelling start (mother gets her head stuck in a cave while in Nepal for a conference about death and then, actually, dies…but not bc of the cave), jangly middle (Trip runs away from a treatment center that his parents have sent him to and then hitches himself to a truck driver while his [dead] mother inhabits another’s body à la Buddhism in a quest to get to her son), tidy-ish ending.
YES, THERE IS A LOT GOING ON HERE.
If you want to read something that explores the idea of body as vessel (i.e. souls), read Plainsong by Kent Haruf (love, love, love this beautiful novel);
If you want to read something about middle-aged women and motherhood with a protagonist who receives very disparate reviews, read All Fours by Miranda July (the parental vibes felt similar and I admit she wasn’t a favorite);
If you want to read something about the ways we contort ourselves to reach others, both figuratively and metaphysically, read Lincoln in the Bardo by George Saunders. (So unique and worthy of all the accolades.)
If you’d like some weird mash-up of the three, I guess read Trip. (And then tell me what you think about the parents — because even I know that a trampoline park won’t save the day every time!)
originally published on instagram