Welcome to another installment of If My Book, the Monkeybicycle feature where authors compare their recently released books to weird things. This week Stephanie Carpenter writes about Moral Treatment, her new novel from Central Michigan University Press.
If Moral Treatment were a nineteenth-century patent remedy, it would be an electropathic belt, crackling with subtle currents and slightly restrictive. A cure for everything from nervous exhaustion to lumbago…and an absolute tonic for sleeplessness. (If not completely satisfied, try again).
If my novel were a union case, it would be the kind with two daguerreotypes facing each other, an old man and a young woman—and sure, those sound like my novel’s protagonists, but they also represent two opposite types, trapped in the allegory of the photo case, positioned not so far apart, after all. In both pictures the sitters look stiff and intractable. You can’t see the apparatuses holding them still, but you know they’re there. You can tell so much about the two sitters from the set of their eyes, mouths, clothing, hair—every detail rendered precisely, in mirror and mercury. But if you tilt the case just a little, you can only see the planes of their faces, like masks, disembodied and oblique. These photos ask you to do more work than what you’re used to. But maybe you’ll love them, anyway. If you shut the case, you could latch its tiny hook-and-eyelet clasp. Or you could leave it open, look again.
If my novel were the Northern Lights, it would be appreciable in two ways: as seen by the naked eye, silvery and wraithlike, curtaining and coiling across the sky; or as seen in photographs, slowed down by exposure times. In the latter view, it would look like most people expect it to: colorful, vibrant, contained. But you can’t actually see the Northern Lights that way—and you can’t take a picture that looks like what you’re seeing. If my novel were the Northern Lights, you would alternate between those two ways of looking, the direct and the mediated, sometimes missing things as you made the switch.
If Moral Treatment were a tarot card, first, I would need to ask someone else to interpret it for me and second, it would be the Hanged Man. From one angle, it would represent surrender and a shift in perspective—letting go of control. From another, it would signify stagnation and resistance to change, a warning against futile self-sacrifice. From both vantages, it would be about the need to pause, reevaluate, and break old patterns.
If my novel were a broken typewriter, it would be missing the quotation mark key. And you know what? You’d barely miss it.
Stephanie Carpenter’s debut novel, Moral Treatment, is the inaugural winner of the Summit Series Prize from Central Michigan University Press. Her collection of stories, Missing Persons, won the 2017 Press 53 Award for Short Fiction; her work has appeared in journals including Ecotone, Copper Nickel, The Missouri Review, and Witness. Stephanie is Assistant Professor of Creative Writing at Michigan Tech University, in the northernmost reaches of the Upper Peninsula. Find her online at stephanie-carpenter.com.