Synopsis:
At a meatpacking facility in Missouri, Dee-Dee and her coworkers kill and butcher 40,000 chickens in a single shift. The work is repetitive and brutal, with each stab and cut a punishment to her hands and joints, but Dee-Dee’s more concerned with what is happening inside her body. After a series of devastating miscarriages, Dee-Dee has found herself pregnant, and she is determined to carry this child to term. Dee-Dee fled the Pentecostal church years ago, but judgment follows her in the form of regular calls from her mother, whose raspy voice urges her to quit living in sin and marry her boyfriend, Daddy, an underemployed ex-con with an insect fetish. With a child on the way, at long last Dee-Dee can bask in her mother and boyfriend’s newfound attention. She will matter. She will be loved. She will be complete. When her charismatic friend Sloane reappears after a twenty-year absence, feeding her insecurities and awakening suppressed desires, Dee-Dee fears she will go back to living in the shadows. Neither the ultimate indignity of yet another miscarriage nor Sloane’s own pregnancy deters her: she must prepare for the baby’s arrival.
Review:
“I feel like you’d enjoy deliver me by Elle Nash… just a feeling,” is what the legend (and oracle?) that is Charlie Battison told me a couple of months ago. What this recommendation says about me remains unclear, but Charlie was very correct. This grisly tale of motherhood, and ruthless dismantling of capitalism and the pentecostal church, “Deliver me,” is a full-body experience that will leave your stomach churned, your emotions in tatters, and your neck sore from whiplash as you hurtle toward an unavoidable yet nontheless painful denouement. Grotesque and vile, yet rich and lyrical, this masterclass in viscerality brims with a dark beauty, and a bloody poetry. Certainly a writer to watch, for as long as you have a therapist on speed dial, Nash does not shy away from the freakish, depraved and taboo, and is well worth the read for any like-minded Halloween person.
There is a poem by Philip Larkin that begins “They fuck you up, your mum and dad.” That much would certainly be true for the child of DeeDee and David (or as he’s referred to throughout the novel Daddy). DeeDee is an unstable and unhinged narrator, clearly still lugging the baggage from her upbringing in the pentecostal church, and multiple miscarriages, Daddy is a felon, who, I suppose rather conveniently for somebody with an insect fetish, has an illegal, exotic insect business. Rather luckily for the non-existent child… it well… doesn’t exist, despite how desperately and fervently DeeDee hopes and prays, there is no bun in the oven. Her delusion reaches a climax when her childhood best friend and obsession Sloane re-enters her life, moving into the flat above with her toddler and boyfriend. If you sense a disaster on the horizon, you’d be right, because DeeDee’s somewhat strange admiration of Sloane quickly veers toward extreme anger and jealousy when Sloane casually announces that she is pregnant again. DeeDee attends pregnancy classes, even invests in a silicone baby bump- all whilst hoping and praying and yearning, only God (and Elle Nash) know the lengths she’d be willing to go to for a baby of her own.
Motherhood is explored in a plethora of ways, most notably in regard to identity. Having built a resentment for her God-fearing mother, and the value Christianity places on childbirth- it’s bizarre to see just how quickly DeeDee reduces her own identity to that of nothing more than an empty vessel for motherhood. Whilst the novel is graphic and depraved in its prose, until the end, very little truly happens. For about 150 pages, Nash indulges in the everyday malaise of DeeDee’s bleak existence: clocking in at “Mike’s” (the local chicken factory), and then clocking out for some disturbing insect-centred sex with Daddy. For at least as long as she’s focused solely on her non-existent child, that’s right: work, eat, insect sex, sleep, repeat. We read from the first person perspective of DeeDee, we learn all about Daddy and Sloane, yet on reflection, nothing about DeeDee aside from that she is not pregnant, and she wants to be. Perhaps Nash is commenting on the crushing desperation of wanting a child, the painful monotony of motherhood itself, and how both seem to strip women down to their reproductive abilities.
These ideas are explored alongside religion. Throughout DeeDee gives a lot of thought to salvation, and the idea that it can be brought about by childbirth. You know the old “go forth and multiply” bit—the Biblical mandate that’s been drilled into her by her strict, religious upbringing. Be fruitful, multiply, and, realistically, most importantly, gain your mother’s approval in the process. However, the prescribed pathway to salvation quickly becomes a spiralling descent, ironically resulting in condemnation and damnation for DeeDee. Nash is likely alluding to how religion can be used to manipulate and misguide, and how what is proclaimed to be able to save and redeem, can ultimately destroy. Faith should not be wielded and used to control, particularly women’s bodies and identities.
With multiple scenes that are permanently engraved in my brain, Elle Nash, and by extension Charlie Battison, have completely ruined my week… thank you. Absurd, depraved and also heart-breaking, “Deliver Me,” is part fever dream and part existential crisis, with a side of insect-laden intimacy that you certainly did not ask for. If you want to sob hysterically, laugh nervously, and never speak of a book again, then I truly do recommend “Deliver Me.”
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