Cat: Here we are, gentlemen, at the end of this terrific read. The final chapters are such an avalanche of rich insights and ideas that I’m certain this book will stick with us in the years to come. Let’s dive in.

In Chapter XI, Meena debates with her “counselors” about the handprint she saw on her pod underwater. She argues with her grandmother,

“But Muthashi, what qualifies something as real in the first place? You define it in the scientific sense: that which is observable, predictable, repeatable, and falsifiable. But so many phenomena are none of those things. Especially lived experience.”

This is the theme of the book for me. The earlier chapters we’ve read have been plagued by uncertainty, particularly due to our zany narrators. In the chapters following, reality further loses its mooring and it’s difficult to know what’s happening. First, there’s the dead woman in the golden sari that keeps reappearing on the trail and then bizarre fellow travelers keep popping up on the Trail. Meena can’t tell what’s real or not due to the growing inability to care for herself. When her scroll sank, the civilized part of her sank. After that, it’s like watching someone being stripped into a creature centered on drive and willpower alone.

It takes a whole lot to make Meena crack in the end and admit the truth of what happened between her and Mohini. All the various stories she tells beforehand about what happened, the snake, her paranoia, how the spicewalaa raped and murdered Mohini, are all constructs to protect her from the soul-crushing truth. She nearly dies before she can admit it.

I think it’s miracle is that she does admit the truth of what happened. She’s under the spell of a powerful self-protecting narrative and she would have died still believing it if it wasn’t for Subu. Subu, who cares for her and brings her back from dehydration and starvation, helps her to the truth. She does destroy his kiosk but he accomplishes what he desires: he’s a successful witness for empiricism, a compassionate reality check. Subus are the angels in the world, bringing real aid to both mind and body with food, medicine and quiet counsel.

Mariama, on the other hand, never fully leaves the strange narrative she crafts. When she rips the kreen out…wow. Wow! Game of Thrones and Stephen King, take notice. It was in that scene where I felt the story crossed over into the threshold of Gabriel Garcia Marquez and Isabel Allende, into the land of magical realism. Magical realism is where magical elements permeate an otherwise mundane world and Byrne used this with terrific effect to poetically question the veracity of her traumatized narrators and the stories they circle around.

Did everything happen as Meena and Mariama narrated or did it not? What exactly did happen? Can we ever really know what was real and what wasn’t? Bryne’s wrestling with some heady questions in this novel about reality and how we each perceive it. These large and unanswerable questions about certainty is what makes the book so hot for me. There’s a few things I know for certain after finishing the story but there’s a lot I don’t. The Girl in the Road will make a great reread. And I have to add as a sidenote, the book’s super bonus is learning so much more about goddesses, India and Ethiopia. I loved that. So, what do you guys think about the ending?

Andrew: I have so many thoughts about the ending of The Girl in the Road, but first I want to take a moment to appreciate the experience of coming to the end of this story. From the first page, this novel has positively overflowed with…well, everything: ideas, emotions, sensations, symbols, memories, stories. At times, there was so much going on that I wondered how it could possibly all come together. Then came the last 50 pages or so, and almost unimaginably, a convergence did start to take place—a convergence of story, and idea, and character, and emotion. The events described were harrowing, but the experience of reading about them was not without pleasure: the almost audible click, click, click of one thing falling into place after another. What really happened in Meena’s bedroom. The chilling truth about Mariama and her kreen. And the meeting of our two narrators at last.

I read these final pages quickly, carried forward by the momentum of suspense and the desire to finally understand the mysteries of the narrative—but I didn’t read carelessly. I found myself rushing forward and coming back at each paragraph, forcing myself to read each word carefully. There was so much packed into those final chapters. I didn’t want to miss anything. There are some good books out there that are undone in their final pages, but that didn’t happen here. For me, the ending of The Girl in the Road made the book. After I finished, I immediately flipped back to the first pages and read again with a new appreciation, a new understanding. That’s a pretty impressive feat, and hats off to Monica for pulling it off.

For me, the theme of the book was ultimately trauma—what it does to us, how we carry it inside us, and how we pass it on from one person to another. The metaphor the book uses for this is energy transfer, waves, systems out of balance and wanting to return to equilibrium. For these characters and this story, the trauma begins with Mariama, who walks home one day to find her mother being raped. The trauma of this event lodges in Mariama’s solar plexus as a kreen that she carries with her for the rest of her life. The trauma intensifies when Yemaya, a trusted surrogate mother, initiates sexual contact with Mariama before she’s old enough to consent—this is abuse, even if Mariama can’t allow herself to see it that way, “the waves coming whether we want them to or not.”

Ultimately, Mariama’s trauma—her kreen—leads her to subject others to trauma, killing Gabriel and Meenakshi and leaving infant Meena behind in the surgical removal of the kreen. Meena, whether she knows it or not, carries the trauma of her bloody entry into the world inside her, manifested as intense thoughts and violent fantasies that she can’t get rid of. And Meena’s trauma is passed on in another violent wave to Mohini—poor Mohini, whose death at Meena’s hands is one of the most harrowing scenes in this very harrowing book.

There’s an analog here between the personal, political, and environmental aspects of The Girl in the Road—on each level, we have systems that have been thrown out of joint by violence and domination, one trauma giving way to another as the system seeks equilibrium. Trauma is not isolated. Everything is connected.

Which brings us to the end—the very end, that is: the epilogue. I’ll confess to being a little bit confused the first time I read the epilogue. I didn’t quite know what was going on, where this was happening, who the girl or the old woman were. Searching online, I found that some readers think the old woman is Yemaya; but Monica herself told me that she intended the old woman to be Mariama’s mother, the one she ran away from at the beginning.

That cleared things up—but, having done the research to find out exactly what was going on in the epilogue, I find myself in the awkward position of actually preferring my initial, confused, ambiguous reading of it. Though on an intellectual level I didn’t know what was going on at first, on an emotional level I understood the significance of what was happening, and that might be all that matters. With all respect to Monica and her authorial intentions, there’s something very dreamlike and indeterminate about the epilogue as it stands, something that can give rise to a host of possible meanings and interpretations in the absence of certainty. For instance, there was a moment when I entertained the notion that Meena might actually be hallucinating the whole thing as she died, stranded, on the Trail; sentences like “There’s nothing left to do but ascend” and “I feel like I might float up into the sky” encouraged me to imagine that Meena was entering into the afterlife and finding there a mythic mother figure and a barefoot child. That’s almost certainly wrong, but I like that interpretation too much to completely let go of it.

What struck me most about that epilogue, though, was the circularity of it, the feeling that even as Meena’s story was coming to an end it was coming to another beginning, too. Today, I reread it and thought of lines of T.S. Eliot’s: “We shall not cease from exploration / And the end of all our exploring / Will be to arrive where we started / And know the place for the first time.”

The end of Meena’s exploring brings her to a new starting place, and it’s a place with a mother, and a child, and saha—a word that stands against the kreen of trauma, a calming word that brings freedom and peace to those who speak it, a word that conveys power, and oneness, and with-ness. It’s a place where Meena can be welcomed in, and rest.

Chris: The book has ended friends. Its revelations now revealed, I find myself quite tormented by The Girl in the Road. I’ve mentioned a few concerns throughout these chats about the direction the book might take in its conclusion. But I admit that I had NO IDEA what lay in store.

There is much to discuss, more than we can ever get to here. Cat, you’ve already hit on that most beautiful concept, the witness for empiricism, that Subu brings. And Andrew you’ve related the metaphor of energy better than I could. I love both of these elements, and they each came together in the novels final 50 pages in a way that assuaged any doubts I may have had. But since each has been covered, I’m instead going to talk about murder.

In a minute. First I wanted to remark upon the tone of the novel. The dreaminess that Byrne achieves throughout much of the book lulls the reader into a state of relaxation. As Mariama recounts her story to a goddess, and Meena holds conversation with mental projections of others, one can be excused for floating off a little, for finding distance between the actions of the story and the lack of urgency in the telling of the story. Until those actions change, at least, when readers are given a much different story in that same dreamy tone. Catch 22 pulled off this same feat. Without changing the tone of her novel, Monica Byrne turns her story of two journeying women on distinct but overlaying paths into the story of two murderers, both, perhaps, quite ill.

Because make no mistake, our humble narrators, Meena and her mother Mariama, are murderers.

It had occurred to me as the story progressed that Byrne was leading Mariama towards some terrible act, though one as horrible as what unfolded I certainly had not predicted. Hats off to Monica for this bravura horror performance. Scalpel slicing murders and auto-cesarean…I mean my god. You’re right Cat, this is straight horror, blood and guts and all.

But unlike Mariama’s story, the murder of Mohini by Meena I did not see coming, and it haunts me in a surprising and visceral way. I think it reveals that the love story between Meena and Mohini moved me more than I realized. In the hours after I completed the book, I couldn’t shake the feeling that I accompanied learning Meena was a murderer. She murdered the person she loved. How could Meena have this story in her as we have traveled together? How can we make sense of it through the lies she told herself?

After reader Lisa’s comments a while back, Andrew and I chatted about Meena and empathy. I mentioned then that it had occurred to me that Meena may suffer from schizophrenia. She had some broad strokes that fit: paranoia, a difficulty identifying reality, psychotic episodes. At that time I wasn’t quite sure what to make of the conversations she held with herself, but now that too bears mentioning. I don’t know what value there is in diagnosing literary characters, but I find myself quite keen to find an answer for Meena, and by extension Mariama, in the aftermath of the book.

Perhaps the notion of trauma that both of you mention above is all that needs to be identified. There is real trauma (and PTSD), and terror, and despair in The Girl in the Road. Now concluded I think it’s possible to return to the beginning and see the book as a story of mental illness.That such illness reveals itself only after elaborate deceptions makes the trauma these women endured more affecting.

No matter what answers might yet come to make sense of the actions, The Girl in the Road is a sad story of lost lives. Mohini, Gabriel and Meena Mehta deserved life, and those lives were lost in violence. Meena and Mariama deserved lives, and those lives were in another sense lost because of violence. And the cycle continues, a snake consuming itself. Hopefully not eternally.

But enough about murder and mental illness. This is our last round-table for The Girl in the Road. Let’s brighten it up.

I don’t know quite how to draw this to a close so I will do it the way I am most comfortable: with sentiment. I am so glad to have started The Stake because it meant one day Cat would get to say: let’s do a book club, and Andrew would respond: how about The Girl in the Road? Neil Gaiman liked it?

We still have reading club posts to come, and we have more to learn from Monica Byrne, but I want to take the opportunity to say to Monica: you’ve written a lovely novel. Thanks for writing it, and more, for reading it with us. Saha.

 

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