Upside Down and the Literature of the Interior Journey
From Dante to Didion, the literature of descent and return has a long tradition. R. Morello writes the most original entry in it in years.
There is an archetype in literature so old and so persistent that it predates the novel as a form: the descent. The hero goes down into the underworld, into the self, into the darkness at the center of things and what they find there determines what they become. Dante walks through Hell to reach Paradiso. Orpheus descends for love. Persephone is taken, and returns changed, and the world changes with her. The pattern reappears in the modern era in Cormac McCarthy’s The Road, in Joan Didion’s The Year of Magical Thinking, in countless works of literary fiction that use the geography of going under as their central structural metaphor. R. Morello’s Upside Down is the most original contribution to this tradition in recent years and what makes it original is that it takes the metaphor and makes it architecture.
Other works in the descent tradition use the underworld as symbol. Morello builds it as a world. Characters do not descend in the metaphorical sense of depression or grief. They literally fall away from their surface selves and exist in an inverted space beneath their own lives. The trials cavern, the novella’s deepest geography, requires physical entry and physical endurance. It is not a symbol of facing one’s past. It is a place where the past is inescapably, sensory fully present: looping, repeating, reaching out. The journey of self confrontation that other literary works describe through interiority and reflection, Morello describes through terrain.
The comparison to Joan Didion’s The Year of Magical Thinking is one of emotional register rather than form. Didion’s memoir of grief after the sudden death of her husband John Gregory Dunne is, among other things, an honest account of how grief resists linearity and of how the grieving person moves forward and then sideways and then backward and then nowhere for a while, in a pattern that does not respect the narratives we are given for loss. Morello’s Caleb moves through grief in exactly this way. He does not process his sister’s death in a clean arc. He suppresses it, circles it, is ambushed by it at unexpected moments, and reaches a place of expression only through a circuitous route that takes most of the novella to complete. The moment when he finally tells Maddy what happened with Shelly, the words coming out in broken, halting fragments between long pauses has the specific texture of Didion’s most honest pages.
Perhaps the most useful comparison for readers who want to understand what kind of book Upside Down is sits with Kazuo Ishiguro’s The Remains of the Day which is a novel whose protagonist, Stevens the butler, is one of literature’s great portraits of a person who has spent a lifetime suppressing everything that might constitute a genuine inner life, and who realizes, very late, what that suppression has cost him. Ishiguro’s genius is that Stevens never fully acknowledges what he has lost and the novel is built from careful evasions, from sentences that stop just short of honesty. Morello takes the opposite approach: the upside down strips evasion away entirely. His characters cannot evade. They can only, finally, speak. Where Ishiguro’s tragedy is the wasted life of the person who never said the true thing, Morello’s drama is the fight of people who know the true thing and are battling to find a way to say it to themselves, and to each other, before it is too late.
Upside Down stands in conversation with all of these works not by resembling any of them closely, but by engaging the same fundamental questions from a vantage point none of them inhabit. It is a descent narrative without mythology, a grief memoir in fiction’s clothing, a portrait of suppression that refuses to end in silence, a community of the fractured that insists on the value of each person within it. It is the kind of book that, once read, makes you look back at the tradition it belongs to and see all of it slightly differently. That is the mark of a work that has done something new with very old material and Morello has done exactly that.
