“The Opposite of Everyone”
Author: Joshlyn Jackson
Publisher: William Morrow
Pages: 291
Price: $26.00 (Hardcover)
Joshlyn Jackson’s novels are always inventive with twisty plots and a degree of the comic but that comic is often dark, not light-hearted. For comedies, there is a rich variety of violence. In several there are buried bodies, and there are always buried secrets. “Between, Georgia” opens with a Doberman attacking an old lady, and the protagonist Nonny Jane, adopted by the respectable Fretts, is the biological daughter of a Crabtree, an essentially depraved criminal family. “The Girl Who Stopped Swimming” features a ghost and a drowned girl. “Backseat Saints” explores the world of spouse abuse and escape from a violent marriage to a women’s shelter.
This new offering, “The Opposite of Everyone,” has many of the elements of a Jackson novel.
It’s told in an extended first-person narrative, the protagonist being Paula Vauss, a successful Atlanta attorney. Thirty-five years old , smart, mixed race, father unknown, with “copper skin, pale tilted eyes,” a “fat-lipped mouth,” she has a half million dollar loft, spare and stylish, wears $900 shoes, with dangerous stiletto heels, and expensive black suits. The suits all look the same, but discerning eyes know they are not. She has a deaf white cat named Henry, and a private investigator, Birdwine, works for her and loves her, and has dark secrets of his own.
Paula Vauss is a tough cookie, and revels in divorce cases where she can punish the errant husband as mercilessly as possible. When she wins she feels high, “made of bone and teeth and iron blood.” We see her at work for selfish, snobbish Oakleigh Winkley who lives in a “southern-style colonial McMansion.”
She reminds the reader: “Divorce by jury was all about which lawyer could spin a better tale, and I’d grown up with a woman who could make a heap of stolen parts sound truer than the truth….I operated inside the ethics of my profession, but I could spin like nobody’s business.”
She succeeds in this case, mainly because Oakleigh’s husband Clark Winkley reveals himself as not just unfaithful but a lunatic. Oakleigh is pleased with the results and Paula’s law partners are “rhapsodizing about the referrals she’ll give her spoiled, rich friends when it came time for their inevitable divorces.”
Paula’s own sex life is strictly noncommittal, carried out, however vigorously and voluminously, on her own terms. “When it came to love, I was the walking incarnation of fists….” She defines her legal work, in fact, as the dismantling of marriages.
Paula seems to have a right to her cynicism, however. Her childhood, which is revealed in inter-chapters, was mostly a nightmare. She was named after the Indian goddess Kali, who wears “a skirt made of human heads and hands” and whose name might mean “the destroyer.” Her very hippie mother, Kai, insists Kali “destroys only to renew, to restore justice.” Kai, self- named of course, was raised by “sour” parents outside Dothan, Alabama. She drinks wine, smokes dope, plays the mandolin, tells stories about the Hindu gods, and moves from man to man. Kai will end up in prison and Paula in a girls’ group home where there is misery enough to startle Charles Dickens. It’s a tough place inhabited by the “leftovers…bereaved… broken.”
Her resentment and anger toward her mother, although huge, are dwarfed by her guilt, an eroding, never-ending guilt, complete with massive panic attacks. (There are several.) She did something truly terrible to Kai, ruined her life. She laments: “I had spent my whole life hungry for forgiveness.” And now a half-brother, Julian, birth name Ganesh, has suddenly appeared and it seems they may have a young sister as well.
Jackson novels often feature characters of “unknown origin.”
“The Opposite of Everyone” quickly becomes a mystery novel. Is Kai, the mother, dead? Is there really a sister? Where? There are clues. P. I. Birdwine sets out on a road trip to explore Paula’s past and bring that story up to the present, carrying out the Hindu refrain that Kai employed in her story telling: "This happened a long time ago and it’s still happening now.”
Don Noble is host of the Alabama Public Television literary interview show “Bookmark with Don Noble.” A shorter form of this review was originally broadcast on Alabama Public Radio.
