Here They Come
by Yannick Murphy
McSweeney’s, 250 pp., $22
Yannick Murphy’s Here They Come is, as its main character might say, a fuck of a book. It’s not a difficult read in the intellectual sense – the majority of the book is written from a 13-year-old’s perspective in the breathless, free-associative style characteristic of that age – but the content would test even the strongest of stomachs. It’s no Bataille, certainly, but an endorsement from A.M. Homes (The End of Alice) accurately portends that this book is, well, uncomfortable.For one, a secondary storyline involving – yes, really – a semipedophiliac hotdog vendor is related blithely and without drama, so much so that the character in question emerges as one of the book’s more benign characters. Everything, but everything, in this book is somehow begrimed: covered in maggots, smeared in dog shit … pick your pollutant. The main character lives on New York’s Lower East Side with her mother and three siblings, and their living conditions are best described as bohemian squalor. Bohemian squalor is still squalor, though, and seeing as Murphy labels her book as a “kind of ‘true’ story” (note the possibly Frey-inspired quote marks), the reader is asked to buy everything at face value. So, for instance, when the narrator is forced to steal burger meat from the grocery and the hidden package leaks cow’s blood on her T-shirt, those of us who are squeamish will recoil, while those of us raised in nonsqualid conditions will likely combust in a fit of bourgie guilt. Describing such extreme conditions is, in a way, easier than writing the banal interestingly, so Murphy’s disadvantage gives her something of an advantage. There is a sense of reverse-naïveté as the narrator describes binding her alcoholic grandmother to a chair with robe ties with the same offhanded casualness as a socialite might in speaking about getting a Bentley for her birthday.
Murphy claims to have written the book in one night, and that much is evident. It’s unstructured as all get-out, and, with the exception of the protagonist’s breasts (described appealingly as “cysts”), nothing really develops. Here’s the weird thing, though: It’s a puzzlingly, infuriatingly well-written book. Murphy doesn’t necessarily have a gift for pacing, and her book is as crammed with imagery as the many station wagons she describes hauling away a mountain of garbage from the narrator’s apartment, but one is hard-pressed to find a single hackneyed line in the entire thing.
A passage toward the end, where the narrator describes walking past her old classrooms and feeling a strange nostalgia for her old teachers –still wearing the ugly sweaters she used to make fun of – is perhaps the best expression I’ve ever read of the melancholy people feel after realizing that the world goes on with or without them. Perhaps an extra night would’ve benefited the book, allowing Murphy to give her firecracker images a little breathing room, but as is it’s still worthwhile, cysts and all. It has its own gasoline-rainbow-in-a-mud-puddle beauty, and vertiginous as it is, those who make it out alive will be justly rewarded.
This article appears in March 17 • 2006.