Molly, Lumens of Darkness: a book review

Molly does not have a raw edge. It’s raw all the way through - like a ripped-open scab the size of a lake, or a fresh wound rushing forth as in a tide, saturating the porous shores of the mind. I’ve never read anything like it before, something so unabashed, honesty in totality, seemingly a direct gush of one’s stunning insides. 

I’ve also never read a book with so many errors, despite its exquisite, published design (Archway Editions). It contains an unprecedented quantity of errors. How can this be? Was it not proofed? Or barely edited? Would the process of another pass-through have been impossible, too much to stand due to the painful content? Or impossible because something so deeply personal and therefore so immediately accurate to the telling, cannot be proofed or edited and still retain its legitimacy? Though I’m curious as to how it made it to print in a state that feels so preliminary, I’m grateful for the fact. The errors become artifacts to place atop the pile of proof that Blake Butler has laid out his angels and demons alike for all to examine, totally and completely without reticence.

Molly is the story of Butler’s life with his late wife, poet Molly Brodak, who took her own life at 39 years old. First, it is an excruciating read. Butler leads us through the lowest valleys of the strangest of planets, Grief. The immediacy with which he describes finding Brodak’s body after she has shot herself - which comprises the unabated opening of the book (“Like the world was just a set that’d been abandoned long ago, and I was the only one still down here wandering around.”) is so intimate, so searing, that instead of forcing the reader to put the book down, it binds us to him right from the start. 

As he pieces together the bits that made their life - the heavy influence of childhood trauma, both his and her struggles with depression, the ways in which they were drawn together and survived together as long as they did, and the post-mortem discovery of Molly’s secret lives rife with self-destructive behavior and infidelities - we find ourselves leaning heavily on his narrative for truth, recognizing his candidness for what it is because we have looked within ourselves and seen the same mutilated glory that constitutes a life.

Butler’s unique prose - I don’t know whether it’s unique to him or unique to this book, which would make sense for its specific and heart-wrenching intimacy - is flooring. It flipped me from an upright attitude to facedown on the hardwood. The language he uses to describe the surfaces and depths of grief, love, and betrayal are torturously beautiful. I have not been so entirely floored by a book since Chang-Rae Lee’s My Year Abroad, which I read years ago and left me reeling from its breathtaking landscape. I find myself, again, completely upended by a story - this one true, and all the more poignant for it. The language is so beautiful, I found myself photographing whole pages, rather than my usual sentence or paragraph.

Butler writes some of the longest sentences I’ve ever read, as I often found myself revisiting the beginnings to find they had little to do with the ends. They were also some of the most wholly stunning sentences - and ideas - I have ever read. Doesn’t it make sense that truest things don’t make sense? What we find within Butler is a truly brilliant and gorgeous mind - one that can see through the bullshit, around the ugliness (which he never denies or plays down), and find gleaming truth in the devastating rubble of human action and interaction. Or maybe just interaction - that’s really all there is, isn’t there? We always leave a wake behind our choices, so plainly indicated in Molly’s story.

All of this...fluidity, for lack of a better word, paints an accurate, emotional account of a life, or a piece of one, void of shame, hiding, and cleaned-up-edness. It illuminates a view so clear, it appears blurry at first or foggy. But what’s really at play here is that we’re not accustomed to this level of craft in combination with this level of exposure. Through all the darkness, struggle, and paradoxes, what remains since I’ve closed the book, is a clear and true picture of love. What love actually is, who deserves it (everyone, most vehemently those in pain), and how to dole it out (without hesitancy, in gobs as big as oceans).

Molly is blinding in its reveal - I found myself stumbling away from the end of the book with the afterimage of bright light in my eyes, agape at how a story of such desolate despair could leave me feeling inspired to live. To go forth tenderly and generously, to be careful and precious with this life, no matter how back-breaking it may feel to live it. Butler has convinced me, through the exposure of terrible and utter darkness, that there is always light worth swimming toward. I urge you to read it, but approach with caution as you knowingly submerge yourself into a palpable darkness of the soul.

(As I correct tenses in the above for consistency, I can’t help but think that Blake Butler - at least this version of Blake Butler - would leave the tenses as they are. So I did. I’m not sorry for the messiness.)