"Molly presented the various fossils, doing everything in her power to engage the tour group, to get them to contemplate the fact that this or that plant had gone so profoundly extinct that it was marooned without linkages to the fossil record.
But when the time came to approach the two glass cases of human artifacts, she fell silent. She allowed them to experience it for themselves, just as she had experienced it alone at the bottom of the Pit: the eeriness of a recognizable object that was slightly yet fundamentally off. A glass Coca-Cola bottle with the unmistakable white script tilting to the left rather than to the right on the red background..." (p. 31)
This, during one of Molly's better days within the book, is but one illustration of The Need's structure of feeling: the most subtle creeping of life slowly gone askew, a barely perceptible yet unignorable, uncanny change. For Molly, it's found in her experiences (her relationships and interactions with her husband and two children) and from objects (several odd artifacts, including a miniature Bible she finds at work). What is it that gradually tears away at what Molly knew as reality, merging it with an alternate one, so insidiously nonchalant in its' judgement that Molly can almost pretend it isn't even happening?
Throughout the novel - its' chapters time-warped and out-of-order similar to Molly's memory - she is split between herself and an alter-ego, Moll, who presents herself as another version of Molly as mother, Molly as wife, Molly as colleague, Molly as human.
"Molly felt feverish, spastic, in comparison.
'Don't ever follow me again,' Moll said, 'or I will kill you.'
There was a glint in her eye - sarcasm or menace? The hint of a more direct reckoning, a convenient disappearance (the outskirts of town, those sparse desolate groves) followed by the seamless insertion of herself into Molly's life?
Molly's struggle to decipher Moll's tone caused her own anguish to lose its focus. She imagined what she herself would be capable of, if; the thought shook her and she had to shake it off." (p. 164)
Despite bouts of paranoia and tiny yet strong vortexes of insanity that Molly becomes subject to, she is consistently passive, accepting, even grateful, in contrast to Moll, holding on to dear life by caring, the best she can, for her husband and her children, her home, keeping up with chores and simple tasks, making sure the quotidian, routine elements of her world remain the same, familiar. While Moll is capable of swift action, Molly moves slower. They are like the ego and id in tandem with one another, trying to find equilibrium, although, as The Need shows, this is a process much more violent than most would like to believe.
"She [Molly] made herself dizzy from it, and when she took a second to look up at all the people idling around her overheated overcrowded home she could have sworn she was moving through a fever dream, a bright chaos to which she had no access whatsoever." (p. 122)
Even as Molly suffers from the violence of the split, of having to watch herself as Moll do what it is that she was meant to do (nurse her children, make love to her husband), of taking verbal slights and cold, sparse criticisms, Molly adapts to her roles in a profoundly simple internal way. She finds herself noticing how she immerses herself in the process of action and inaction, in the work of life itself: the slow urgency of consciousness and its mutability, moving from the zen-like machinations of the body and its appendages and "motors", to affecting reflections on presence and meaning, back and forth. It is Moll who interrupts this flow as a vexing, aggressive manifestation of Molly's (perhaps necessary) fear and anger.
"Yet eventually the familiar process, the pattern of shovel, chisel, hammer, razor blade, soothed her, absorbed her, as it had for all these years. Her focus took hold of her and time passed in the Pit, in times of observation, she forgot that she was a mother. That she existed at all, really, except as a pair of eyes and hands." (p. 41)
Phillips' novel isn't extravagant about being science-fiction: her writing about the Pit being a "seam" where alternate realities can enter her character's realities, is only mentioned a few times, as an offered theory, not as a full-blown world-building extravaganza. This is refreshing in the genre. It's just as real as the actual manipulation of time and atmosphere as a matter of fact. In completion of the book, Phillips' leaves room with a message saying that it is up to us to make of this what we really, well, need.
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