Review by New York Times Review
THE ANGLO-SAXON epic "Beowulf" has a historic place in English literature. But how much contemporary cultural resonance does it have? Plenty, Maria Dahvana Headley suggests in her new novel, "The Mere Wife" - if you mess around with it enough. Quick recap of "Beowulf": A monster named Grendel is slaughtering the denizens of Heorot, a Danish feudal stronghold, on a nightly basis. From across the Kattegat, a warrior called Beowulf arrives with his comrades-in-arms, offering to save them. In battle, he defeats Grendel, wrenching off the monster's shoulder and arm as proof of his victory. Problem solved? Not quite. Grendel's vengeful mother soon ravages Heorot. But Beowulf tracks her down beneath the burning/ freezing waters of a "mere," where he kills her and beheads the corpse of her son. Later in his life, in his own land, Beowulf confronts a troublemaking dragon. Both die. The action is gory and the monsters colorful, especially the dragon. The do-gooding hero is also keen for riches and fame, and he's not subtle about it. Headley (whose previous books include "Magonia" and "Queen of Kings") isn't the first writer to approach this tale from the monster's point of view; John Gardner's 1971 novel, "Grendel," did the same. But "The Mere Wife" brings the story into the 21st century in a curious way. Here, the mother of Grendel's counterpart, Gren, is a traumatized American veteran, Dana Mills, who inexplicably escapes from a hostage situation after her beheading is broadcast to the world. She's six months pregnant from an encounter she doesn't remember. Once she returns to the United States and gives birth, she and her son take refuge in the caverns of a mountain with an abandoned railway station at its heart and a sulfurous lake at its foot (once the site of a hot-springs resort). During her absence, an upscale gated community, Herat Hall, has sprung up on her old stamping grounds. Gren isn't like other children. "His eyes are gold," Dana tells us. "He's all bones and angles. He has long lashes, like black feathers. He's almost as tall as I am and he's only 7. To me, he looks like my son. To everyone else? I don't know. A wonder? A danger? A boy? A boy with brown skin?" Gren is a changeable figure, depending on who's observing him. He has claws that can do a fair amount of damage. And he's as curious about Herot Hall as his mother is wary of it. Those interests are reciprocal. Willa Herat, wife to a plastic surgeon, Roger, grew up thinking the mountain was haunted. However, their 7-year-old son, Dylan, is at ease with his surroundings, and especially pleased to have a pal who wanders down from the mountain to play with him. But when he describes Gren to his parents, they're convinced he's an imaginary friend. At the same time, Willa believes a "wild animal" is prowling their home, but Ben Woolf, a policeman who's also a veteran like Dana, has his doubts. Then things take a bloody turn. Headley's jabs at suburban smugness are fun ("To us, and people like us" is a favorite Herat Hall toast), and Dana's hallucinatory flashbacks to the desert war are both harrowing and disorienting ("I don't know what real is, I don't know what alive is"). Headley's prose can be stark, lacerating, insightful ("If events don't make sense, a story grows to cover up the confusion"), but it also has its over-the-top lapses. "The trees are saw blades stuck in the snow," Willa thinks at a crisis point. "The snake in her vein wriggles and turns to an earthworm, a pale pink shudder making its way in and out of her body." The metaphorical flights grow especially wild and woolly in the book's last lap. But the role reversals Headley devises - and the way she adapts an ancient tale into a 21st-century struggle between haves and have-nots, brown-skinned and white, damaged and intact - are largely effective. Genuine wisdom sometimes emerges. "The world isn't large enough for monsters and heroes at once," Ben reflects toward the end. "There's too much danger of confusion between the two categories." That seems especially true in Headley's imaginative realm, where identifying monsters and monstrous acts has less to do with fact than perception. Michael Upchurch's novels include "The Flame Forest" and "Passive Intruder." He is the former book critic of The Seattle Times.
Copyright (c) The New York Times Company [August 5, 2018]
Review by Booklist Review
*Starred Review* Headley's (Aerie, 2016) fourth novel is a stunner: a darkly electric reinterpretation of Beowulf that upends its Old English framework to comment on the nature of heroes and how we other those different from ourselves. It deftly interweaves a host of contemporary themes, from racial tensions to veterans' reintegration, political corruption, and female power. In modern suburbia, a well-regulated gated community is juxtaposed against the frightening, untamed wildness outside. Following her traumatic captivity while fighting for America overseas, Dana Mills found herself pregnant and is unsure how it happened. Bearing several battle scars, she and her son, Gren, now live in an abandoned railway station inside a mountain. In the nearby valley, Willa Herot, a discontented housewife, resides at Herot Hall with her son, Dylan, and husband, Roger; the trio appears to be the perfect family. When music from Dylan's piano drifts upward, attracting Gren's curiosity, the boys become secret friends, sparking a chain of often-surprising events (the story creatively deviates from the original). Besides Dana, other first-person narrators include a chorus of suburban matriarchs, police hounds on the scent, and the observant mountain itself. A strange tale told with sharp poetic imagery and mythic fervor, Headley's novel prompts examination of how people create or become monsters.--Johnson, Sarah Copyright 2010 Booklist
From Booklist, Copyright (c) American Library Association. Used with permission.
Review by Publisher's Weekly Review
"Everyone might be a monster underneath their skin," thinks Dana Mills, a character in this clever reimagining of Beowulf as a mordant glimpse of the mores of contemporary suburbia. Dana is a maimed ex-soldier who lives in an abandoned railroad tunnel above her hometown, Herot Hall, with Gren, her son, through whom the author, by being intentionally vague about his appearance, emphasizes the idea that monstrousness is in the eye of the beholder. When Gren befriends Dylan "Dil" Herot (Gren and Dil's names combine to sound much like Grendel, one of the antagonists in Beowulf), the young son of descendants of the town's founder with whom he shares a close bond, the stage is set for a dramatic face-off between Dana and local cop Ben Woolf. When Ben is called to investigate Dana and Dil's unintended disruption of a Christmas party at the Herots', he interprets it as a home invasion that must be avenged. Headley (Magonia) applies the broad contours of the Beowulf story to her tale but skillfully seeds her novel with reflections on anxieties and neuroses that speak to the concerns of modern parenting. Her narrative leaps between grisly incidents of violence and touching moments of motherly love that turn her tale's source material inside out and situate it in a recognizable modern landscape where, as Ben accepts, "the world isn't large enough for monsters and heroes at once." (July) © Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.
(c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved
Review by Library Journal Review
This lyrical novel uses the Old English epic Beowulf as its template, but in this rendering, female and matriarchal power move to the fore. Grendel's mom has a name here: Dana Mills, an Iraq war veteran who has survived an attempted beheading and been impregnated by an unknown wartime father. She and her monster of a son live in an abandoned railroad station under a mountain mere, or inland sea, near an Aspen-like community called Herot Hall. Its elite citizens parallel the poem's Danes. There's a chorus of formidable mothers and mothers-in-law, but the tale centers on one powerful woman, Willa Herot, whose son befriends Grendel, drawing him and Dana toward civilization and danger. Dana slays Willa's husband, Roger, and Willa subsequently marries the sexy police chief, Ben Woolf. Those familiar with the long poem can see where this is going. VERDICT As with any mythically or allegorically driven novel, the plot becomes fantastical when grafted onto modern tropes. Nevertheless, Headley's heroic prose and vivid imagery offers thought-provoking correlations between ancient themes and recent historical events. Its emphasis on feminist power gives an old tale renewed significance. [See Prepub Alert, 11/12/17.]-Reba Leiding, emeritus, James Madison Univ. Lib., Harrisonburg, VA © Copyright 2018. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
(c) Copyright Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
Review by Kirkus Book Review
Headley, a writer of juvenile fiction (Aerie, 2016, etc.) and fantasy, steps into the adult world with this spot-on reimagining of a classic of Old English literature.Think "mere" as sea, as in the Old English, and not just as some dismissive term. Think of the world as the author of Beowulf did, where sea caves shelter monsters and great mead halls harbor mighty warriors who melt away when the monsters make their way inland. Headley recasts the geography of a place that's most contemporary, a suburb of cul-de-sacs and playgrounds, meant to be a community but full of people who live their own isolated lives, while up on the bordering mountain of which the brochures boast, strange things are afoot. Willa has her doubts about the planned community of Herot Hall "I always thought it might be a mistake to leave the back of the houses unfenced," she fretsand for good reason, for within a cave on the mountain live Dana, a PTSD-scarred returned soldier, and her son, Gren, who are definitive outsiders. Unsocialized, wild, brown-skinned Gren has learned from Dana that Herot Hall is a place of monsters that "tear people from limb to limb," but Gren is infatuated with Willa's son, Dylan, who dares play outside and shows no fear. The fraught friendship of the two throws the carefully constructed worlds of Willa, who keeps weekly menus taped to her refrigerator, and Dana, who is never far away from military-grade weapons, into a spin; Herot Hall may be a "toddler empire," but it is now a place of amber alerts and armed patrols, all courtesy of a combat-ready cop named Ben Woolf. Things do not end well in Herot Hall or on the mountain either: "There are sirens," writes Headley with lyrical assuredness, "and then more sirens, like God has come down from heaven and called out for every church to lay tribute."There's not a false note in this retelling, which does the Beowulf poet and his spear-Danes proud. Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
