Barrelhouse Reviews: We’re Safe When We’re Alone by Nghiem Tran
Reviewed by David Lewis
Coffee House Press / September 2023 / 168 pp
Your memory just won’t turn me loose
And I’m living on memories of you
Dolly Parton’s “Living On Memories of You”
In Nghiem Tran’s debut novel, the young narrator and his father are the only living beings in a world populated by ghosts. These ghosts aren’t lonely nodes of ectoplasm wandering through the warm, living world; this is their world. The narrator and his father are the outsiders, trying to create a life in a place where tensions between memory, family, destiny and free will take physical form and reshape the environment around them.
The story starts with the young narrator leading a bookish life, happily cloistered in his home from the ghosts outside. When his father says he has to start interacting with the dead, it’s so contrary to his instincts that he thinks his father has lost his mind. “The worst has come true. A ghost has possessed Father. I only have myself to depend on in this perilous world.”
He awkwardly ventures out of his home. Everyone seems at ease, while he finds the outside world terrifyingly daunting. His father wants him to play with the ghost children; he’s timid and unsure. They try to include him in a game of tag, but he’s too weak to keep up with them. “[The ghosts’] energy seems exponential. The source of their glee is a deep mystery to me. I grow dizzy. […] The ghosts appear to share a clear understanding of how they should behave in this world. They do not seem to doubt who they are or what role they have among one another.” He finds them both fascinating and intimidating. When they drop him as quickly as they accepted him, he’s once again cut off. But instead of the quiet isolation of his home, where he was an unobserved spectator, he now experiences the self-conscious isolation of being the odd member out.
Tran flips ghost story conventions upside down and draws inspiration from Greco-Roman myth to tell the tale; he uses the chthonic setting expertly. As the narrator grows and overcomes anxieties, the underworld creates new ones for him to succumb to. When his father weakens with age and asks him to carry on his work, the narrator finds new sources of strength. “I realize that I was always capable of this work. When Father first asked me to join him on the farm, I should have agreed. I should not have been so resistant. I could have found a way to adjust and give Father what he wanted. Then he wouldn’t have been so afraid for my well-being. He wouldn’t be tormented with helplessness.” Seeing his father aging shows the narrator where his power lies. But just as he finds new strengths, he entrenches himself in his weaknesses. When his father’s health seriously deteriorates, he won’t accept it. When he says “You can’t be Father. Father would never behave like this,” it has the ring of a leitmotif. The more he changes, the more he stays the same.
Memory is at the center of this story: the narrator’s memories of his father’s strength and the lost memories of his mother; the memories of life that the ghosts have lost and pine to recover; the abandoned memories that take physical form as ravenous shadows, swallowing up buildings and land. In the book’s dream logic, thought and emotion manifest themselves physically. Memories are “not just something inside our minds,” the narrator’s father says as they walk through a forest. “They’re as real as any object, these trees, the berries, the farm, the mansion.” Retrieving a memory could make it appear metaphorically or literally. Regardless, it will have an emotional pull—something anyone who has lost a loved one can understand. These memories have the capacity to either elevate or consume personality. In one of the book’s more troubling scenes, the narrator witnesses a ceremony that strips ghosts of their memories, which is a necessary process to survive in the afterlife. Once removed from the body, the memories manifest as a black water that is then placed in a coffin.
Screams erupt from the coffin, and the wood sounds as if it is going to break. We sit still as the shrieking grows louder. I imagine that the black water has formed its own body and is terrified of losing its life. I imagine the pain it must feel to be separated from its host, never to unite with the ghost again. Are we no longer human if our most painful memories are lost? Are they what give our existence meaning? I should be overjoyed that the shadow has been stripped from the ghost, but my heart aches at what I am witnessing. No sounds come from the coffin anymore, but I am unsure if the memories inside have given up or have found peace.
Without our memories, we become the ghosts that the narrator finds so self-assured and comfortable. But does that come at the cost of our humanity? Where is the balance between wallowing in the past and reverent remembrance? How do we keep the present alive without abandoning who we’ve become?
Fortunately, the book doesn’t create absolute dichotomies or prescribe a universal balance for experiencing the past and present. People (or ghosts) experience their memories differently and they manage the repercussions of facing them with different levels of success. We’re Safe When We’re Alone shows a constant respect for that ambiguity and particularism. The narrator occasionally comes across as vindictive and puerile, which can push a reader away. Yet he redeems himself, in that his love for his father motivates him, and he has none of an adolescent’s selfishness. His love is so strong that it borders on deification; “Father” is always written with a capital “F,” another reason the thought of him weakening is impossible to accept. And the tragedy of this story lies in the fact that despite the narrator’s growing power over memory, he has no more control over his present life than any of us.
Fiction often wants to present grief as a linear progression with clear starting and ending points, as if loss were a problem that can be solved once and for all and our difficult emotions can eventually be brought under our control. One of the refreshing things about Tran’s novel is the slippery nature of coping with change and loss it presents. Even though the narrator’s love for his father is absolute, that love doesn’t always make him act like a good person. In this world of ghosts, he shows some of the great qualities and flaws in human nature. If you’re dealing with your own grief, We’re Safe When We’re Alone won’t point to a way out of melancholy and sadness. But it might make you feel less alone.
David Lewis’ fiction and essays have appeared or are forthcoming in The Weird Fiction Review, 21st Century Ghost Stories Volume II, Wicked Horror, Joyland Magazine, Chelsea Station, The Fish Anthology, Liars’ League London, Willesden Herald: New Short Stories 9, Fairlight Books, Paris Lit Up, Compulsive Reader and others. Originally from Oklahoma, he now lives in France with his husband and dog.