Parakeet by Marie-Helene Bertino

Published by Farrar, Straus and Giroux on June 2, 2020

Luna is living an unusual life. While awaiting transportation in an ambulance, she watches a woman remove her shoes and place them in a mailbox, unless this is something she might have imagined. Her grandmother has been reincarnated as a bird, or so it seems to her. She is getting married to “the groom” if she decides to go through with it, but her grandmother-bird crapped all over her wedding dress so she needs to find another one. Every time the elevator door opens in the building where she plans to wed, she steps out onto the same floor. Stairs are no better because there are more flights of stairs than the building has floors. A diner turns into a ship sailing on the waves of the stock market, although Luna might have dreamt that one.

After a long estrangement, Luna reunites with her brother Tom, a former addict, and learns that Tom is now Simone, who holds a “woman’s grace and the person I used to know’s ability to entertain with an offhand gesture. She is simultaneous.” Tom/Simone wrote a successful play about Luna’s life called Parakeet and used the earnings to finance the first phase of a sex transition. Compared to the rest of Luna's life, her brother returning as a woman “is the only thing that makes sense.”

Luna wakes up with a hangover one morning and discovers that she has physically transformed into her mother. This doesn’t surprise Tom/Simone, who realizes that “sooner or later every woman wakes up and realizes she is her mother.” Fortunately, the physical transformation is short-term.

What are we to make of Luna? Her name suggests a character who is mentally troubled and her observations suggest an unreliable narrator. Yet she seems quite sane, or no less insane than most people who are on the verge of getting married. In the story’s second half, we learn about a formative trauma while Luna was a bit younger that clearly affected her life, but questions remain about what is real and what is delusion. Luna hears on a radio program that stories should not start with “Once upon a time” but with “This never happened,” perhaps a reminder that fiction can do violence to a reader’s understanding of reality because none of it real.

“Will Luna get married or not?” is a broad description of the plot, to the extent that one exists. Some of her mishaps might be interpreted as the manifestation of a desire to remain unwed. There may be good reason for Luna to avoid marriage. While the story has surrealistic moments, it is anchored in the reality of family. Luna is marrying into a conventional family. The groom’s mother secretly (and then openly) scorns her as a “brown gypsy.” Luna avoids her groom’s perfect family because it makes her yearn for her own, messed-up family. “And then I’d have to acknowledge that I was missing incorrect, anxious freaks, and that I was one of them. People with good families can’t fathom those without. Or that we don’t want to borrow theirs.” Parakeet reminds us that there are no good families or bad families. There are only our families.

We do not choose to be born into a family, but marriage is about making a family, and marriage is a voluntary choice. Even if it seems destined or the right thing to do, we can always decide that marrying and becoming a family, in general or with a particular person, is not something we want. The choice Luna will make is uncertain as she approaches and endures her wedding day. The resolution might or might not be seen as a happy ending, but happiness is a matter of perspective.

At the novel’s end, Luna wonders whether she is a good person. She thinks the answer depends on who you ask. Simone agrees and tells her “so you better be careful who you ask.” Readers might have different opinions about whether Luna is a good person. She is clearly a troubled person. Maybe she doesn’t always make wise choices. But when it counts, including standing up for Simone’s right to stop being Tom, she proves that she has a good heart.

The novel is ultimately about finding yourself and being open to the possibility that what you find might later change. “Tiny, inconsequential shifts” in the path your life takes produce “unexpected vistas” and each shift causes you “to make room for yourself again and again.” Parakeet is charming in its oddness and wise in the lessons it teaches.

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