Barrelhouse Reviews: Half, by Sharon Harrigan

Review by Elizabeth Gonzalez James

University of Wisconsin Press / June, 2020 / 280 pp

Not many novels use the first-person plural perspective. We the Animals by Justin Torres is a notable example, as is The Virgin Suicides by Jeffrey Eugenides. We want, their characters cry, we try, we scream, we can’t, their collective agony jarring but powerful for its refusal to be decimated to a single I. Half, the debut novel from Sharon Harrigan, begins with identical twins sitting on either side of their mother at their father’s funeral. We wedged, they say, we slipped, we held on, we couldn’t live. Each declarative statement grounds the reader in the scene, slips her inside a body to feel the hard church pew, the chill wind, the jutting hips of a frail mother. But then the reader remembers she is bifurcated, in two bodies instead of one, inside two distinct women—Artis and Paula—conceivably with their own thoughts, desires, fears, regrets. The we voice, that stubborn collective, merges the two women and takes the reader through two lives lived as one. 

From the funeral, the novel takes us back to the girls’ childhood in a working-class community outside Detroit, where Artis and Paula live in a world created by their domineering and abusive father, Moose.

“Why does the sun rise every morning?” we asked.
We answered in a fake Mom voice: “Because your dad likes it that way.”
“Why does it get so cold every winter we freeze our butts off?”
“Because our butts are too big?”
“No, because your dad likes it that way.”

Moose controls how much their mother weighs and how much money she spends. He controls clothing and birthdays and breakfasts and weekends and the sizes of the bruises on their bare thighs. And so when their father says he can make winter change to spring, and the girls see the snow melt before their eyes, they believe him.

Much of the girls’ young lives is spent discerning how much of their father is reality and how much is myth, though the distinction is moot until they are old enough to leave home and direct their own lives. But even then his shadow covers them, as they contend with guilt over leaving their mother at home with her abuser as well as their own shame, anger, and confusion. Paula and Artis lived with a man who would deny them food and force them to sleep outside in the snow, but who taught them to track and to hunt, to be self-reliant, to believe in their own immortality. And though he hit them, he loved them deeply and ferociously. As the years go by, as their life with Moose recedes, and the twins begin to disagree about what their relationship to their father should be, a curious thing happens: the twins begin to split apart. The plural is dropped in favor of the singular, the point of view shifts, and the whole world changes.

Half isn’t just a novel about surviving a traumatic childhood, but also what gets lost as a result of that survival. In college, the twins take a psychology course where they learn about different kinds of delusions. When the professor speaks of delusions of grandeur, the girls think of their father. When the professor speaks of the delusion of believing another person can read your mind, the girls think of themselves. But in the world of the novel, it is no delusion to believe intimacy could engender a connection so deep that not even existing in two separate bodies could sever it. And when the girls begin to diverge in adulthood, it is the loss of this intimacy, the loss of the pronoun we, two splitting into one and one, or one splitting into half and half, that leaves the deepest scars. For siblings who endured their father’s tyranny by making themselves one, the sundering may be their greatest tragedy.

The novel falters only once toward the end, when Harrigan introduces a medical condition to explain certain aspects of a character, potentially excusing behaviors that remain uglier and more compelling without neat explanation.

But that small circumstance notwithstanding, Half is an aching and beautiful novel that probes the blurred space between siblings and expands upon the consciousness that emerges from shared jokes, shared memories, and shared pain. The we point of view is a brilliant device, allowing us to see through four eyes that may as well be two, and feel the sharp incision when that world is split apart, when we becomes she and I, her and me. Harrigan’s writing is confident and spare, unafraid of bold assertions. “There’s a time for questions and a time for guns,” the twins tell us. We get the sense that the tone of their inner monologue comes from their father, that the man who controlled everything in their lives controls their very thoughts, and even their story. Though we know of his death on the first page, his life fills every sentence, his breath whispers behind every syllable. The shared point of view speaks for both girls, but perhaps in a sense also for the father, for a complicated, damaged, and cruel man who begs, if not for absolution, then at least understanding from his daughters. Which one he gets depends, ultimately, on which twin is speaking.  

Elizabeth Gonzalez James’s stories and essays have appeared in Ploughshares Blog, The Idaho Review, [PANK], Split Lip Magazine, The Rumpus, and elsewhere, and have received numerous Pushcart Prize and Best of the Net nominations. Her debut novel, MONA AT SEA, was a finalist in the 2019 SFWP Literary Awards judged by Carmen Maria Machado, and is forthcoming in July 2021. Read more at www.elizabethgonzalezjames.com.