Our lives pivot on formative moments, tiny slices of time in which chaos collides us with people we do not know and events we cannot predict. Leave the house five minutes early and meet our soulmate on a train we would normally never take; leave five minutes late and get hit by a car that would have been miles away if we'd left on time. And in this, we come to understand that fortune, or fate, or whatever face we bestow upon random chance, is something we can never anticipate. More's the pity. For while some of us are positively impacted by these collisions, others are utterly transformed by them in ways that leave behind very little of what we once were. Few individuals are more familiar with this than Ms. Fragoso. She demonstrates in her vivid and jagged memoir.
An urban child of the 1980s, Ms. Fragoso was born into a fractious family. Her American mother's psychological instability and her Latin father's searing resentments not only deprived her of a supportive homelife upon which she could build her future, their contentiousness drove her out into ther New-Jersey neighborhood to find there a measure of attention and affection not forthcoming at home. Notionally monitored by her mother, Ms. Fragoso, after encountering various characters, tumbles into the orbit of Peter, a Vietnam veteran who, 44 years her senior, is a creature of paternal gentleness. A twice-married man facing a long and difficult decline into agedness, Peter makes Margaux into a shield against decrepitude, giving to her the attention and play she so craves while extracting from her, in turn, a child's innocence.
As the years pass, Margaux and Peter embark upon a journey of mutual devastation. Their relationship, consummated when Margaux is seven years old, lasts until she is 22, but the intervening fifteen years are far from happy. For what began in affection, albeit manipulated, is increasingly marked by jealousy, discord, envy and emotional abuse. Their interactions, stained by what has past between them, become increasingly toxic until selfishness and despair finally sunder their strange and mutually dependent union, leaving Margaux alone in a world she has not been prepared to confront.
As creepy as it is moving, Tiger, Tiger is a 330-page explanation of why we protect our young from sex and relationships. For while peter is undoubtedly a molester of children, he is also someone Ms. Fragoso loves. She is tortured by that love, but it is still love that she feels, love for a man who took her into the basement of his home and changed her young life forever. She was utterly ill-equipped to recognize Peter's self-important excuses, his self-serving justifications, his self-pleasing manipulations. She, like anyone her age, saw only a man who gave her what her parents did not, love without limits or conditions. She could not recognize his martyrdom, his selfishness, his lack of self-control. And so she allowed herself to be grafted onto him. She allowed herself to be sustenance for a vampire who just happened to enjoy innocence more than blood. She allowed herself to be built up into a fantasy frozen in time because she could not imagine her life holding anything else.
There are drawbacks here. Ms. Fragoso reconstructs long and detailed conversations from her childhood without making any attempt to explain how she accomplished this feat. Moreover, she gives us no sense of perspective, no sense of events that followed Peter's departure from her life. Notwithstanding these small flaws, though, Tiger, Tiger is a vehicle for Ms. Fragoso's keen mind, for her lyrical pen and for her wounded heart, all of which combine to lend the work punch and consequence.
This is no savage, overwrought evisceration of child molesters; popular culture has done that for Ms. Fragoso. No, this is a quieter contemplation of the darker side of love: how much we need it, how we can be fooled into it, and how it can keep us enchained despite our best attempts at freedom. In this, Tiger, Tiger is more than worthy of its grave topic. (4/5 Stars)
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