Vacation Mode: On the Literary Relationship Between Travel and Madness

In the opening scene of season two of The White Lotus , the camera perches above the Sicilian coastline. Rows of blue and white umbrellas are placed exactly the same distance apart. We see Daphne, a lithe blonde woman in a printed one-piece bathing suit. An Aperol spritz sits on her side table. A Louis Vuitton purse rests on the chair next to her. Daphne is beautiful, apparently wealthy, seemingly privileged in countless other ways, and happy. “We had the best time,” Daphne gushes to the guests next to her that have just arrived. “Italy’s just so romantic. Oh, you’re gonna die.” Then, she wanders into the water for one last swim, and comes across a dead body. The story begins one week earlier, and eventually circles back to this same moment with Daphne on the beach. By now, we know that she and her devilishly handsome, slippery husband love each other, but they’ve also hurt each other so many times that Daphne could keep up her coping routine of dissociating and retaliating—or she might just snap. There is a rich tradition of storytelling through which we get a look inside the lives of beautiful people on beautiful adventures, only to find that such beauty can be a mirage. It can even tip a person into madness. Both iterations of Mike White’s The White Lotus , Emma Cline’s novel The Guest , and Bong Joon Ho’s film Parasite are recent popular examples of a canon that includes Patricia Highsmith’s The Talented Mr. Ripley , F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby , and Stephen King’s The Shining . This year, we have three entries into this sub-genre of literature: Rachel Lyon’s Fruit of the Dead , Scarlett Thomas’s The Sleepwalkers , and Kimberly King Parsons’s We Were the Universe. All of them feature women losing something core to their identities—childhood, success, independence, sisterhood—and literally trying to escape that loss. They all land in beautiful places—a private island, a Greek honeymoon, a Montana river town—only to find their losses festering in strange and dangerous ways. Add these books to your tote […]

Click here to view original page at Vacation Mode: On the Literary Relationship Between Travel and Madness

© 2024, wcadmin. All rights reserved, Writers Critique, LLC Unless otherwise noted, all posts remain copyright of their respective authors.