Alexandra managed to escape her father’s house and put together a life for herself. She married as her heart yearned, adopted kids instead of bearing biological ones, nurtured a career in a field she’s chosen. Of her four brothers and sisters, she is the luckiest because she’s made her life all on her own terms. This is not the case for the others who lead lives their father convinced them to take.
Now, against her wishes and better judgment, Alexandra is leaving her husband and children for a short while to return to her father’s yellow home in the yellow wood. He won’t be around forever. This might be her last chance to see him.
Alexandra will face his disapproval again, she will find herself in conflict with his wishes again, and despite all this she will come to learn a few things about the siblings she left behind, the father she’s been fleeing, the mother who abandoned them, and about herself.
The yellow wood where the family dwells holds secrets, magical truths hidden from plain sight. Alexander, the father she was named after, knows some of these secrets as well as some of the ways to manipulate them. If her father is to have his way, then Alexandra will receive one of his life-changing gifts, a means by which he might see his desire that “The Kove family will bring good into this world.” (21)
What could he offer that she will want or accept? Nothing, she thinks, but perhaps a surprise awaits both of them.
Melanie Tem’s The Yellow Wood presents yet another unique and quirky exploration of a community on the verge of collapse visited by a dysfunctional element that will push it to its limits. This time around, the supernatural is a far more subtle manifestation. There may be actual magic, or it might just be illusions manufactured by a father-figure who relies on manipulation and power plays to dominate and shape his children’s lives and perspectives.
As alluded to in the title (which draws a reference to Robert Frost’s poem, “The Road Not Taken”), Tem’s narrative finds its voice via two perspective characters each ruminating on lifepaths taken and not. The protagonist is Alexandra, and her point of view is given first person with no italics. However, Tem regularly shifts to her father’s first-person point of view as well, using italics to clue the reader in that POV has changed. This switch back and forth between perspectives will occur several times throughout the novel’s prologue and fifteen chapters. The result is a conversation between minds, which the characters are never consciously privy to, but which we readers are. This illumination of the thoughts, hearts, and spirits of the two characters is surprisingly revelatory.
Alexander, in particular, is made into a far more fascinating character than he might have otherwise been. Sure, he remains an unyielding dominant force almost completely without sympathetic characteristics. The “gifts” he has pushed upon his children have generally ruined their lives, turning sister Emily into a baby-making factory whose recent child was born with cerebral atrophy (essentially an incomplete brain) and making her feel like a failure somehow responsible for a random event, turning Galen into a gardener who hates gardening, turning Vaughn into a composer who plays instruments out of habit and not out of actual interest … Alexander is verbally disappointed with the ways all his children squander or misuse his blessings. The biggest disappointment of all is Alexandra, of course. She turned away from one such gift, using the writing he gave her for reports and memos instead of what he considers its purest and best forms: prose and poetry.
She does not write. How can this be? She writes only reports and memos for the companies she works for, the occasional newsletter article. This is not art. She creates no beauty, expresses no horror, nothing new or important. Nothing that will mark her passage through this world, or mine.
Who does she think she is? This is not what I raised her to be. This is not why I sacrificed and suffered. I could have taken the easier and safer route and just not bothered to train a sinecure and standard-bearer for everything I have always prized but been too weak to act upon. Connections to other people. Expansive love. Tolerance. Writing. I could have just given up and let it all abort.
Instead, with enormous cost to myself, I gave it to Alexandra, the child among all my children who had more than ordinary potential. And she has squandered it. She has betrayed my trust. (The Yellow Wood, 47)
While he could easily have been a one-dimensional antagonist, a straw man argument for Worst Parent of All Time, Tem is too good a writer to settle for that sort of character. Instead, there is method to his madness and layers to him. He is aware of his own flaws, but he refuses to confront them or change them.
Consider this pairing of perspectives, first from Alexandra reflecting on a lesson she learned as a child about the differences to be found in people:
I remember hoping my brothers would show up and just as desperately hoping they wouldn’t. Where were they, anyway? The woods were still and might as well have been home to nothing but me and Daddy.
“Come over here, Alexandra.” This time it was a command, though not yet harsh. For a long time, much of what I did was to get him to say my name like that.
Taking several steps toward him, I could see what he held. Not the harmonica, though I hadn’t noticed him put it down, but a lump the size of a basketball of some thick squishy substance like modelling clay. There was a face in it. I looked again. There were three, four, six, countless faces in it, under my father’s hands.
But then, with a chill, I saw that he wasn’t touching the clay. His hands made a place for it, but there was space all around between the surface of the brown lump and his long white hands. The faces were taking and losing shape into and out of the clay, all by themselves. Except that I knew he had something to do with it. He had something to do with everything.
I sat down on the ground beside him and together we watched the cavalcade of faces emerge and recede. Daddy told me who they were. Not anybody we knew personally, but people who, Daddy gave me to understand, were real and lived in this world. People of all different races. Having never seen anybody who wasn’t white, I found them beautiful and hideous, alluring and scary. Old people, even older than Grandpa, whom we saw once a year. Newborns and not-even newborns with only the promise of faces; right there and then he made me memorize the pronunciation and spelling of the new words: foetus; embryo. People with no arms, blind people, people who couldn’t walk. All kinds of people in that ball of clay. I stared.
Then my father took my hands. Took them for his own. Daddy touched us often and easily so there was nothing alarming about that, but when I guessed his intention I recoiled and squirmed and tried to close my fists. He was stronger and smarter than I would ever be. His long, thin fingers dwarfed mine. His palms were twice the size of the backs of my hands.
With great care he positioned my hands where he wanted them among all those faces, and then he pressed down. The clay gave, shifted, rose between my fingers and around my wrists. It was neither warm nor cool, neither wet nor dry. It felt just like me. I couldn’t tell where my flesh ended and the flesh of all those faces began.
My father held me there. With his arms around me from behind, I felt his breathing and his heartbeat through my shoulder blades. His thin thighs in those silly plaid pants made a V that I fit right into, protecting my back while exposing me to whatever came next.
The faces were moving. I felt eyes open and close, mouths turn up and down, brows knit; my own eyes, mouth, eyebrows, cheeks, teeth, tongue, chin slid into one expression after another. My left thumb quivered from the pulse under someone’s jaw, and my own pulse raced. A moustache rasped the web between my right ring finger and pinky, and the skin of my own upper lip prickled. The insides of my wrists were tickled by hair quite unlike my own—nappy, luxuriant, sparse, stiff—and the roots of my braids stirred.
At five years old, I understood without thinking about it that magic existed in the world in much the same way as weather or the woods: perfectly natural by definition, since it was part of everyday life and by nature mysterious. When later I could put words to what transpired that morning, it came as no surprise that Daddy had been giving me both a gift and an order, neither of which I had the option to refuse, even if I’d wanted to, which at that point I didn’t.
Personally, Daddy didn’t like people who were different from him. His discomfort around my best friend Penny was mortifying, and he outright glowered at my Korean homecoming date, whom I’d had to go into the city to find. Later the next day, my father had the balls to say to me, “I taught you wrong.” (The Yellow Wood, 97-100)
Now, let’s look at Alexander’s own view on the magic to be found in the woods and the world outside their door (interposed with a younger Alexandra’s ritualistic chant of disparaging but not necessarily inaccurate descriptions for the man):
Galen, Vaughn, Will, and Emily all understand something about the magic if not the sanctity of life. Galen resists the local cultural pressure to hunt and fish, and is active in political, social, and ecological causes in which it often appears I believe more than he does. Vaughn makes music, his flute or didgeridoo or bongo nearly a living creature in the near or distant wood. Emily started having babies at eighteen and did not stop until well into her forties; she does not find being a mother especially fulfilling, but she is good at it, her gift, her curse. In much the same spirit, Will gardens—out of duty far more than pleasure, but his tomatoes and roses are nonetheless sweet.
“Daddy is a robber, Daddy is a creep, Daddy is a—”
Of all of us, Alexandra is the one who goes out into the world. She always has; I sent her there, an emissary and standard-bearer, then lost my nerve for her and tried to pull her back where she would be safe, which naturally made her stay away with a vengeance. Sometimes I think I taught her wrong. Sometimes I allow myself pride.
“—wizard—”
It has been all I could do to love my father and mother, my wife, and my children. Never a friend, not my siblings or grandchildren, certainly not humanity as a whole. Considering where I started, this is no small feat. It is, however, insufficient. Therefore, I developed in Alexandra her natural ability to love expansively, to extend herself, to risk. That led her to marry a man I would never have chosen for her, an actual African from the continent of Africa, and to claim children who can only bring trouble.
“—Daddy is a thief.”
I taught her to explore the wood, which, though I built my house and my family and my life here, frightens me enough that I have never ventured far into it myself. At three years old, her mother preoccupied, not to say overwhelmed, by the baby and I with what was taking shape in my wife’s heart, Alexandra got lost in the woods for half a day. Her mother found her. I could not bring myself to go in there after her. Making a show of unity, as parents are supposed to do, we both shouted and both cried and both imposed a rule that she could no longer go outside the house without one of us. Alexandra looked at me, specifically me, as if I had betrayed her, and in important ways I had. (The Yellow Wood, 24-26)
He’s an unlikeable human being, and a terrific foil for Alexandra’s compassionate humanism. He is also a kind of flipside to a similar domineering father figure. In Tem’s first published novel, Prodigal, the young protagonist finds herself caught up between a family who loves her (but is unable to make her feel properly protected) and a dark father figure who makes her feel loved (but is really only interested in using her as a source of big emotions for him to consume). That character, Jerry Johnson, turns out to be a psychic vampire who affects a friendly face in order to lure his prey close. Alexander in The Yellow Wood is just as much of a user and consumer as Jerry Johnson was. However, he adopts an unfriendly face and uses the tools of emotional abuse to assert his dominance and sway his children. Both characters surround themselves with groups of younger characters who have been groomed for submission, human beings reduced to prey. The Yellow Wood is far more subtle and metaphoric, but it certainly reflects Prodigal’s dichotomy of characters as either consumers or the consumed.
There is beauty and tragedy to be found in these two intimate character studies. And that is where a novel like The Yellow Wood shines brightest. Not as a category horror novel, not as a slipstream or dark fantasy, but as a literate and literary study of two extraordinary characters unlike any we’ve quite seen before. Tem’s gift here is in presenting one of those communities she wrote so well, with the supernatural and corrosive presence already enmeshed, interrupted by the arrival of someone who is unafraid to see through the familial façade, who must grapple with her own feelings and hard coded submissive tendencies, and who nevertheless forces herself, her siblings, and even her antagonist father to see each other for who they are.
Some communities need to be broken apart, the text argues, if any kind of healing or hope is to be had. Here is a sly and subtle approach to a toxic environment and one character’s ability to clear the air. There’s a surprising amount of hope to be found here. The Yellow Wood is an engaging exploration of unsettling subject matter and characters, and it’s a crowning achievement in Melanie Tem’s too short career in clearheadedly and candidly conveying the vulnerabilities to be found in families and societies-in-miniature as well as those sick minds and spirits who exploit such vulnerabilities for their own ends.
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The Yellow Wood is available in paperback and eBook editions.
Next week, we will take a look at Melanie Tem’s most recent book. Although The Yellow Wood is the last book Tem saw through to publication before her untimely death, she left additional manuscripts in various stages. Her husband, Steve Rasnic Tem, has seen one of these find its way into the world. The YA speculative fiction novel Absence is available in paperback and eBook editions.
“The Kove Family Will Bring Good Into This World: Melanie Tem’s The Yellow Wood” is copyright © 2024 by Daniel R. Robichaud. Quotes and cover image taken from the ChiZine paperback edition, released in 2015.
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