Issue 46: Summer 2019

A Review of Victoria Hetherington’s Mooncalves

Mooncalves Victoria Hetherington Now or Never Publishing 2019, 260 pp., $19.95

Mooncalves is Victoria Hetherington’s debut novel, released in April of 2019 with the BC press Now or Never. A work of great thematic depth, it deals among many other things with the ways that cults and adjacent forms of reality-control work on people. It appears at a moment when these themes are just beginning to receive sensitive, rather than sensationalist, treatment in the culture: examples include Wild, Wild Country and Leaving Neverland. As with these documentaries, Mooncalves uses the testimony of many voices to rebuild, with great empathy and care, a sense of reality in the aftermath.

Its story is mostly told by three women and a girl—Logan, Shelagh, Erica, and Abby—who differ to various degrees in age, ethnicity, social class, personality, and, in Abby’s case, period in time. Erica and Shelagh are lovers just before Erica returns to the cult leader Joseph Reiser’s farm in rural Quebec; Erica and a young, pregnant Logan live on the farm together; and Abby is Logan’s daughter, born after the time of the cult but compelled to learn all she can about what happened there. Abby investigates this history with the help of Buppy, a doglike, godlike “synthetic companion” I completely loved and about whom I have had to restrain myself from writing paragraph after paragraph. The cult of Joseph Reiser is the terrible common denominator among all of these characters, and the book’s ornate narrative structure puts us in a position akin to Abby’s: we piece together the details one out-of-sequence testimony at a time. But to try to get at what makes this book so compelling, and at how it works on you as a reader, I don’t want to summarize it any further. I want to talk about its title.
A mooncalf, in the folklore of early modernity, was a monstrous birth, a miscarriage, or a false pregnancy; alternately, a mooncalf was a fool. Caliban is called a mooncalf several times in The Tempest in an apparent conflation of both meanings, and his speeches resonate with the themes of Mooncalves in their painful study of the miserable intimacies of power: “You taught me language,” he says to Miranda, “and my profit on't / Is, I know how to curse. The red plague rid you / For learning me your language!” The characters in Mooncalves are similarly entangled in forms of power that seem to both curse them and profoundly shape who they are. When Logan considers the circumstances that lead her to meet rich older men through a sugar daddies website, she points to a “whole life stuffed full of reasons going so far back I might well have been born for it, born ready.” The mooncalf’s associations with birth and pregnancy are just as relevant to Hetherington’s book. Mother-daughter relationships are a crucible for the personalities of several characters, especially when those relationships are darkened by the shadow of oppressive men. But not all mother-daughter bonds in the book are like that. Logan is pregnant when she comes to Reiser’s farm, but she escapes; her subsequent relationship with Abby is among the more tender and hopeful in the book. Reiser himself is obsessed with fertility, but in an abstract and narcissistic way—classically paternal rather than maternal. So, when I think of the title of Mooncalves, I also think of the terrifying end of Adrienne Rich’s poem “August,” which depicts the turn from matrilineal to patrilineal (and patriarchal) society:
His mind is too simple, I cannot go on sharing his nightmares My own are becoming clearer, they open into prehistory Which looks like a village lit with blood where all the fathers are crying: My son is mine!
As with these primordial fathers, Reiser doesn’t just want to control the lives and reproductive futures of his so-called “family”; he also wants control of their deaths. He gives his followers necklaces filled with poison, instructing them to take it if their community is under outside threat. His conception of the afterlife is correspondingly lush; he describes it lovingly. Despite its appearance as the title of the book, note that the word “mooncalves” never appears anywhere in the text and is never explained; my attempt to unpack some of its possible meanings is just that—an attempt. The mysterious word simply sits on top of the story like a colour transparency, framing it in a new way by its sheer presence.
The title of Mooncalves is one of the many, many little details at the fringes of this book that help to make it so provocative and so full. Other such details are opening quotations from Nietzsche, Ray Kurzweil, Isaac Asimov, and Leonard Cohen, or the cryptic designation of the Abby chapters as taking place in the “Post-Singularity” and in “Toronto, Theoretical Space.” The book implies, with an agile subtlety, that by the time Abby is a teen a certain technological transcendence has occurred—albeit to a planet so ecologically ravaged and socially stratified that hardly anyone can enjoy it properly. Hetherington is a poet as well as a novelist, and her wonderfully oblique approach to narrative struck me as a natural way forward for a writer with those dual practices. Mooncalves is like an object that can’t stay floating the same side up for very long; it ruminates, as a human (or posthuman?) mind might, on gender and sexuality, cults and power, technology and culture, cities and ecologies. In doing so it takes up the mantle of the philosophical novel in a particularly generous and admirable way.
Mooncalves is like an object that can’t stay floating the same side up for very long; it ruminates, as a human (or posthuman?) mind might, on gender and sexuality, cults and power, technology and culture, cities and ecologies.
Call it a philosophical novel in photo-negative: there are no clumsy allegories here, and I think it would be so wrong to reduce the “message” of this book to any unified theorem. It is relatively easy to write a hot take—“if someone Bad said that the Bad thing is Bad, could it be that the Bad thing is…Good?”—but very hard to do what Mooncalves has done, especially for the questions of technological advance and ecological collapse that thrum constantly in the background. It assembles its rich materials and puts them squarely in your court, where it becomes your job to sort out for yourself what you think of the Singularity, of back-to-the-land movements, of the amount of hope that each of us should hold about the way the next few decades will turn out in our burning world. Given that Erica, Logan, Shelagh, and Abby each have a chance to express themselves so fully and believably, and also to give assessments of one another that are often very much at odds with the ways they present themselves, we develop a powerful sense of the truth as something acquired dialectically, socially. And although Mooncalves often deals with scenarios of incredible cruelty, there’s an almost epistemological kindness to this book. We hear people out.
But we also hear Joseph Reiser pontificate about the impending merge of most of humanity into a post-Singularity “Soup” (a Bad thing, in his view). As a cult leader, he reminded me to an equal extent of Ted Kaczynski (hatred of technology and romantic view of nature), Jim Jones (messianic self-presentation and death drive), and Charles Manson (sheer libidinal malice). He abjures technology, appears to have a green thumb, but has to phone his mother to recall how to do basic household chores. I found him loathsome and thought that Abby’s instinctual reading-between-the-lines of old, overly sympathetic newspaper stories about him was entirely correct. Yet I think it’s an important facet of this book’s epistemological kindness that it asks us to try to understand why a 32-year-old Erica goes back to the man who groomed her when she was 14; that we hear this in her words, but also Shelagh’s, Logan’s, and Abby’s; and that we recognize how obdurate such bonds can be for survivors of this kind of abuse. It felt important particularly because the subject of cults is so often treated comedically—think hacky jokes about Kool-Aid—and without very much empathy for those on the inside. In Mooncalves we see a cult from the point of view of a woman who knows damn well what is happening to her—as Shelagh says of Erica, “She was as much a feminist as me, as any smart Toronto girl at least pretends to be”—and yet finds its pull too strong to fight on her own. Another of Mooncalves’ provocations is that the cultist may not even be all that wrong about current affairs. Reiser foresees a simultaneous, perhaps even reciprocal ecological collapse and technological hyperexpansion, a position that in other contexts would seem quite respectable. In a similar vein, my partner recalls an undergraduate media studies class in which the professor circulated Kaczynski’s manifesto with the author’s name removed; the class largely found his thesis cogent, at least in the broad strokes. And I defy anyone to tell me that Jim Jones was wrong about the evils of American imperialism (or San Francisco housing policy for that matter). Mooncalves suggests that the trouble with cult leaders isn’t so much that they think the end is nigh, because in a sense it always has been; their danger comes instead from the hyperbole of their delivery, their posturing that they’re the first person to think of all this, and perhaps most importantly their insistence that there’s no way forward other than their cult. Which of course also squashes the possibility of collective action, a harder and messier thing that requires the sharing of praise and blame.
Another of Mooncalves’ provocations is that the cultist may not even be all that wrong about current affairs.

I am using the term “cult” for simplicity’s sake, but since it often implies a large group it is worth mentioning that the size of Reiser’s “family” is always extremely small: just Joseph and three friends when he is younger, Joseph and Erica for much of the book, and then Joseph, Erica, and Logan. Four—and, significantly, a fourth who is a man—proves to be too many. This small scale makes Mooncalves seem as much a study of destructive intimacies and abusive relationships more generally as it does of cults per se. And Hetherington’s prose, always keen and incisive, is especially so when it touches on dominance dynamics and the ways in which people try to fit themselves inside them with just enough room to breathe—until suddenly there isn’t any. And so reading this book can sometimes feel suffocating, but in the way that Wuthering Heights is suffocating, or Last Exit to Brooklyn, or the desperate final chapters of Madame Bovary, when the lovers have all gone and the debts are finally being called in and Flaubert, the physician’s son, records the collapse of a poisoned body with pitiless accuracy. Like these books, Mooncalves can be at times deeply, almost cosmically sad. And like these books we are left to gather up our own conclusions or inconclusions from what we have seen.
Whenever I write a review of a good book, I always find myself wanting to say more about it than I possibly can. I wish I’d said more about Mooncalves’ gorgeously-written late turn toward a kind of magical realism, which I completely welcomed, and I wish I had found a natural place to talk about the relationship between Abby and Buppy, my favourite in the book and a constant source of fascination to me. But it would only be fair to leave those discoveries to my fellow readers. I will leave you with one last anecdote instead. Toronto, Theoretical Space, is so stricken by the great collapse that there aren’t even enough Spaghetti-Os to go around anymore. But Abby and Buppy have the consolation of psychic time travel—an even more intense version of that thing we do when we read. It’s not an exact science. As Buppy puts it, “Time and space are bound up in too complex a dialectic,” and the traveller is liable to over-or-undershoot their destination a few times before they get it right. But Abby really wants to understand what happened to her mother in the days when she carried her in the womb, so after some fits and starts she manages to travel with Buppy to Joseph’s farm. Unseen and unheard, they watch Erica fall back into the well of his power. “It is finished,” Abby says, after Erica breaks down in tears while braiding Joseph’s hair. Buppy, who had been set to “late-period Romantic Poet” by Logan the night before, says, “she has become a tree.” I was struck by this image but I did not know what to make of it. I continued to read the book, and then finished it. A week went by. I rode buses to and from my day job. I worked in an office. I drank too much coffee. I ate lunches in the crowded de facto dining hall in front of the Central Branch of the Vancouver Library. Then I heard the word “nymph” somewhere, and in a flash I remembered the story of Daphne, told in Ovid’s Metamorphosis and plenty of other places too. In this story, the god Apollo chases the nymph Daphne because he desires control of her body. Daphne does not want to be caught by Apollo, but she is unable to outrun him. She turns herself into a tree. All this to say that if you read Victoria Hetherington’s Mooncalves, it will linger with you in the days and weeks after you think you have finished it. It moves through time and space in a complex dialectic of its own.