-Naked Singularity
2008 The Ledger, Washington-Tacoma
2003 Dallas ObserverDallas, TX
2003 Texas Books in Review, Dallas, TX
2003 Reviewer Magazine, San Diego, CA
2003 Carrollton Leader Star, Carrollton, TX
2003 Publishers Weekly
2003 D Magazine: Front Burner Dallas, TX
2003 Curled-up with a Good Book Review
2003 WASHline, Washington DC
2003 Kirkus Reviews
2003 Ethical Culture Review by Kurt Johnson
2003 Gerrit Henry, NY, NY
Texas Books in Review, “Daddy’s Girls” by Clay Reynolds
Naked Singularity by Victoria N. Alexander. (Sag Harbor, NY: The Permanent Press, 2003. 208 pp. $24 cloth)
Dallas native Victoria Alexander’s second novel, Naked Singularity, examines the relationship of a marginalized daughter attempting to come to terms with the painful death of her father. Hali, the youngest daughter of David MacDonald, a moderately successful Dallas journalist, has made her life away from her father and family. Married to a wealthy artist and well established in New York City, Hali is pursing her doctorate in the philosophy of science when she receives word that her father, an inveterate pipe smoker, has been diagnosed with cancer of the throat and larynx. She returns home, perfunctorily at first, to offer titular and somewhat sentimental support as he goes through various treatments to shrink and possibly destroy the tumor. She hopes that his growing debilitation will be less a prelude to a painful loss than merely a bump in the smooth road her life has become.
Her visits home during this early stage of her father’s treatment bring her to a new awareness of his personality. She discovers how alike they are in some ways and yet how polarized they remain owing to her perception of him as a somewhat aloof and recalcitrant individual, given to drink, to battles wit her mother and his ex-wife over religion, and to a kind practical flippancy about life that she initially saw as shallow and lacking in philosophy. As they associate more closely with one another, discussing films, and arguing cosmology and metaphysics, though, she finds herself drawn to a closer understanding of this man who has had such an impact on making her who she is. Although he lacks the formal instruction in which she has so completely immersed herself, his views and conclusions make striking sense to her and tend to simplify that which she had previously seen as highly complex. Unlike her sisters, who are far more conventional in their lifestyles and achievements, Hali sees that she is very much her father’s daughter.
The realization is not entirely comfortable. As his cancer goes first into remission and then emerges more virulent and threatening than ever, she understand that he is dying, that he will die soon, and that his death will be both painful and to some extent humiliating for a man who has always been fiercely independent and self-sufficient. Initially, she tries to run away, to escape her responsibility to him, but this, she finally acknowledges, is no answer. Returning to Dallas, she is confronted with his recognition that he is dying and also with his decision to commit suicide rather than face a prolonged and pitiful end. He takes her into his confidence in the matter, but she soon realizes that his attempts are not going to succeed, for in spite of his protestations of agnosticism and an eagerness to accept death, he is afraid.
As she becomes closer and closer to this man who sired her, reared her, and now relies on her utterly, she comes to a deeper and almost shattering realization. Rather that being independent and free-willed, Hali finds herself alone and manipulated by emotions she cannot control. Her husband, Seth, a philandering dilettante who is far more interested in his own father’s death, in his art, and in his money than in what Hali is going through, provides no meaningful support. Referring to her as “Halibut” (a bottom-feeding fish), he seems constantly to be using her as some sort of prop, a necessary element of the perfect life of the artist he has created for himself. Her sisters, helpless in the face of their grief, become distractions to her purpose and offer no consolation. Her mother is only concerned about her ex-husband’s rejection of the church, and David’s second wife, Candice, devoted as she is to her husband and respectful as she is of Hali’s special relationship to him, becomes an impediment to her purpose.
Hali’s attempts to assist her father are ineffective, and she winds up enlisting the support of his nurse, a shady figure who clearly has more interest in Hali, in her money and her sexuality, than in any sense of compassion for David. Together they manage, at last, to ease her father out of his pain and out of this life. The consequences, though, become telling on her, not only from the potential threat represented by the nurse, but also on her view of herself.
This novel works well because of the way Hali’s character develops. At the outset, she is a highly confident “contemporary woman,” one who relies utterly on the epistemology of science and the certainty of physical reality. She has arranged her life and set her course on the predicate of her supreme self-confidence. She knows she is intelligent, talented, beautiful, and, thanks to her marriage, wealthy. She relies on her mind and her abilities to sustain her against any self-doubt or penetrating questions that might undermine her surety.
In a sense, this novel is about the “meltdown” of a singular personality, about the slow erosion of confidence in the face of a grim and harsh reality. Hali realizes that cold intellectualism cannot displace human emotion, cannot provide substantial answers to vague questions about life and death, and, more particularly, about love and compassion. This discovery ultimately leads her to questions that she cannot easily answer. And finally, it merely leaves her insecure and afraid.
Beautifully written, Naked Singularity effectively ties disparate philosophies together. Demonstrating that the relationship between the hardest, coldest picture of the universe and the inexplicable pattern of human life and the mysteries of the human heart is far more complex than any quick analysis can explain, it reveals something meaningful about the way our contemporary world works and demonstrates that, in the end, no matter how much we learn or think we know, we are still our fathers’ children.
Kirkus
Kirkus Reviews
A far cry from the hot-hostess high-jinks of Smoking Hopes (1996), Alexander’s first novel, this is a painfully personal tale of Daddy’s Little Girl come home to Texas to agonize over whether she should help him die quietly, thereby avoiding his gruesome end from throat cancer. Hali may be diminutive, but she’s no lightweight, being a PhD in teleology and a major babe besides. When she arrives on the scene from New York, however, where her “open” relationship with an artist on the cusp of fame has hit a rough patch, she`s already aware that she may have to fulfill a tough special role for the family. At first, there’s hope, as Dad reads optimism in his doctor’s evasions and the punishing therapy seems to be having its desired effect. Father and daughter discover a renewed appreciation for each other’s cosmological interests and similar philosophies. But not many months pass before a different scenario emerges: last-chance surgery is ruled out as the cancer spreads to his spinal column and Hali is at Dad’s bedside when he speaks privately to her of helping him out. Eventually, she agrees, and with the help of a muscle-bound drifter in nurse’s garb she becomes the family Kevorkian – except that Dad won’t die no matter how many drug cocktails they give him, and Hali and the nurse feel increasingly the tugs of a fatal attraction.
The emotions are raw at times, but there’s a cool tone of postmodern post-mortem throughout as well, raising hackles and sympathy from first to last.
Publishers Weekly
Alexander (Smoking Hopes) takes on a gut-wrenching topic in this ambitious second novel, which tells the story of a Texas woman who returns home to care for her dying father and faces a profound dilemma when he asks her to help him commit suicide. Hali is helping her father, Dave, in his battle against throat cancer, a fight that seems winnable when his chemotherapy works and the cancer goes into remission. But Dave’s respite proves brief, and when the cancer begins to advance again, Hali knows the request her father will soon make. At first, the plan seems simple: Hali and Thomas, one of the two nurses who provide round-the-clock home care, will administer a lethal but painless mix of morphine, alcohol and other painkillers. But the first hit of morphine fails due to Dave’s tremendous resistance to the drug, the other nurse begins to suspect euthanasia, and their plans go dangerously awry. Alexander writes eloquently about the family’s daily emotional pain. The lurid, macabre ending, which involves the attraction between Thomas and Hali, a climax that seems barely believable. (Dec.)
A Novel Explores the Spectrum of Euthanasia
Reviewed by Kurt Johnson
“Death’s inevitability is the Great Teacher” tradition quotes the Buddha as saying. This novel confronts death with a similar passion. In Naked Singularity (“Your last metaphor for God was the Singularity” [p. 22]) Victoria Alexander examines and grapples with the conundrum of euthanasia.
The book’s subject is no surprise to those who know Ms. Alexander’s biography. A relatively recent PhD graduate, she has published scholarly work in literary criticism, science, and teleological philosophy (of teleology Webster says “the character…attributed to nature or natural processes of being directed toward an end or shaped by a purpose”).
The heroine of Naked Singularity is also a teleologist, as well as a woman with a tortured relationship with her father. Now dying, he has been source of her life’s greatest angst and inspiration. Fitting the teleological theme, this chimeric paternal relationship has predicated her other bonds with men, including both husband and lovers. She is both deeply intellectual and an extremely sexual being.
Into this fertile ground for story-telling– confronting questions of love, impermanence, betrayal, inevitable death, assisted death, the hopeful and the jaded– Dr. Alexander introduces the inward-most existential thoughts of her heroine (often fond or discordant remembrances of her father) italicized, and used to set-off, or break, portions of the storyline:
“I have often heard you say that a fatal action began when your father had yelled at your mother, Get in the car, and she had obeyed. …Easier to attribute death to the mysterious purpose of some greater power than think it might have been avoided”. (p. 44)
This device allows the author to introduce multiple-angled views on the question of euthanasia through the thought-struggles of her characters. In life, Dr. Alexander specializes in “mechanistic teleology” (wherein direction emerges from within–“in the rearview mirror all is determined, if not inevitable.” [p. 64]). Where has musing ended and the story line begun again? What is really real here? What has really happened? If I felt this way, how would I act?
In the story, of course, it is this dying father who expects this “courageous” “renegade” among his daughters to be the one to mercifully “snuff him out” when he has finally had enough. Can she? Will she? And, if so, who can she trust to help?– all questions by book’s-end rendered into a maze of philosophical alternatives left by Alexander, apparently on purpose, for the reader to sort out. Publishers Weekly found the book’s ending “barely believable” but perhaps that reviewer missed what may be Dr. Alexander’s precise point– that none of us can be exactly sure about what is true in our lives and none of can be exactly sure of what we might do if faced with such a request by one of our most loved ones.
Other reviewers have called this book “painful”, “raw”, “gut-wrenching”, “lurid” and “macabre”– yet also “profound”. Metaphorically, perhaps the best way to read this book is to simply bring your own baggage, get on the train, and see where it takes you. There is very little in the spectral question of assisted death that is not explored in this relatively short novel, which can be read in one sitting. One may feel quite blank by the time one has gotten to the end, but perhaps this is the point. As Dr. Alexander’s heroine muses to herself, hearkening back to the Big Bang:
“Old light, tired starlight, climbing out of the last planetary abyss, tell us what you know. What agency broke the primordial symmetry? Who gave us these frozen accidents, our laws? But there was no answer to the question because of the way it was posed. They failed to understand that a Naked Singularity would not be like a god at all, except in his absence. He would have no throne to squat upon, no object in view. He would be but a symbol, bubbling up in the rolling void. Nothing so grand as anti-entropic entities like you and I, builders, painters and celestial mapmakers”. (p. 92).
The reader is left to ponder whether the daughter’s acceptance of her father’s ultimate request would be entropic or anti-entropic after all, and, lastly, what could be measured of its grandeur.
Kurt Johnson is a member of the Board of Trustees of the Brooklyn Society for Ethical Culture and the National Service Conference of the AEU. With a doctorate in evolutionary biology, he has published widely concerning conservation and ecological issues and is also active in inter-cultural and inter-religious dialogue. Originally in the Christian religious life, Dr. Johnson spent a year during that period working with dying children.
The Ledger, Washington-Tacoma
A father’s love and assisted suicide create “Naked Singularity”
Kayla Cogdill
Issue date: 4/17/03 Section: Arts & Entertainment
“Woven into ‘Naked Singularity’s’ metaphors and narrative is a profound understanding of current ideas on chaos and complexity,” said James P. Crutchfeild of the Sante Fe Institute. “It renders esoteric constructs concrete, and in a setting none of us can escape.”
When Hali’s father discusses the different methods of suicide available, Hali accepts what she is expected to do. But when the time comes, emotions and a childhood remembrance of God come into play.
Hali’s love for her father creates a twisted paradox and she seeks help from her father’s male hospice nurse to assist in the complicated suicide.
The book cover elaborates, “Naked Singularity” as portrait of love between father and daughter, done with grace and humor and without sentimentality. That statement is highly disagreeable.
The sentimental implications in the book are secrete and complicated, “involving misplaced love, manipulations and a slow and painful end. Singularities are believed to lurk at the hearts of black holes, which conceal their existence from the outer world. A naked singularity would be a singularity bereft of a concealing black-hole shell, and therefore visible, in principle, to outside observers,” says Hali.
The only things other than singularity that will be left naked after reading this book are your emotions.
Naked Singularity
Washline
Reviewed by Bill Creasy, Washington Secular Humanists
Euthanasia is a medical ethical problem that is simple to state in general as a right to die or a right not to suffer. It is much more complex in practice, though. A terminally ill person, who may not be able to make decisions, must rely on family members who are emotional, grief-stricken, and vulnerable, and who are forced to make painful decisions.
This is the subject of an excellent novel by Victoria Alexander. The novel is about a young woman, Hali MacDonald, whose father has terminal cancer of the throat, after a lifetime of pipe smoking. He asks her, rather than her two sisters, to help him perform euthanasia if it becomes necessary. The novel follows her conflicted thoughts and actions as she tries to fulfill his wishes. Meanwhile, she must cope with her sisters, mother, stepmother, and husband. To add more conflict, two nurses are hired to care for the father; one is close to turning Hali in, and another helps her for his own questionable motives. The characterization of all these individuals is convincing. The relationship between Hali and her father is very touching and illustrates the way that interactions between fathers and daughters change over time.
The novel is written in an interesting style that is not strictly linear, but is more like memory. In the course of the events, the heroine reflects on questions of the meaning of lives and actions in a secular humanist framework. For example, Hali thinks, “The body is a thing. A man dies, and that is all of him. All that he ever was was in his movements.” The Naked Singularity of the title refers to the first uncaused cause of the Big Bang and the universe, which Hali thinks of as a physical effect, not God.
Euthanasia is an important subject, and Ms. Alexander has done a commendible effort in examining a morally and emotionally difficult situation.
Review by Gerrit Henry
Alexander, Victoria N. Naked Singularity.The Permanent Press, 2003, Sag Harbor. 189 pp. One of the many dark beauties of Victoria N. Alexander’s new novel is that, not only is it the proverbial good read, it is also an aproverbially brilliant one. Alexander–holder of a Ph.D in English from CUNY, Graduate School–has dished up a heart-stoppingly beautiful heroine who holds similar degrees in teleology (the study of why) and she thinks, and writes, like a dream. Witness this sample from a soliloquy by Hali on death: “You had thought death would at least be romantic, but now you realize there is nothing to be thankful for–how vacuous, how colorless, how without pity, how without regard for your intentions . . . . ” This, from a piece of popular fiction, is almost asking too much in the matter of sheer, unabused style.
Unfortunately, both narrator and author have run up against that same ontically insurmountable obstacle as described above: Hali’s beloved father, former pipe fiend Dave MacDonald, is, as we join the proceedings, being slowly undone, in sickbed and out, by a gross cancer that proceeds from mere discomfort of the throat areas to grueling pain of the neck and head, a progression unforeseen by his bubble-brained doctors to the utter despair of this wife and three daughters, including Hali.
There’s darker to come. On one of her trips to Texas from New York–where Hali resides with her husband Seth, a slightly noble, thus not completely understanding, type–Hali’s father asks her, his youngest, if she will privately assist him in bringing about his death, before nature can take its grisly course. Hali–perhaps more to the reader’s surprise than her own–agrees, not wanting to see her father reduced to the level of disfigured effigy, long-suffering or short. ‘Tis a consummation, they both agree, devoutly to be wished, and brought about.
And full, it must be added, of misjudgments and misintentions, not so much on the part of Hali, but the tortured psyche of slim-hipped, drawling, East Texas night nurse they’re hired to while away Dave’s nocturnal hours. In ungracious cahoots with Hali, Thomas, as pictured by Alexander, does for euthanasia what Raskalnikov did for murder: Dave MacDonald is subjected to a steady stream of lethal drugs (injected through a feeding tube implanted in his stomach) including morphine, Valium, Vicodin, Dilaudid, even Nyquil–all without any effect except to plunge Hali’s father into one faux-coma after another.
At times, the coloring of the whole affair becomes so dark as to make us believe we’re in the midst of some whopper of a black comedy. But as Dave’s wife and daughters begin to fall apart, singly and collectively, as Hali spends her afternoons running ten miles at a clip, and blackmail abruptly becomes more than a subtext, we begin to see far more clearly the true themes of Alexander’s novel: the savage intractability of life, equaled only by the dauntless superiority of death, the terrible malfeasance that seems to have brought all of it on, and the state of ontological vacuum resulting, with each as culpable as the next, and no one safe from death except death itself.
I’m not going to reveal the conclusion of Naked Singularity, except to wonder out loud if Hali is ever going to be free of Thomas, even with that noble Seth–noble, and newly nasty–standing by. I promised you a good read, and guarantee you’ll get it. But you’ll also get much more, much of it existentially inconvenient, much more lagniappe for the soul.
