Review: Mrs Caliban - Rachel Ingalls

‘She was halfway across the checked linoleum floor of her nice safe kitchen, when the screen door opened and a gigantic six-foot-seven-inch frog-like creature shouldered its way into the house and stood stock still in front of her’

Mrs Caliban is your typical story of a housewife’s love for an enormous sea monster. Virtually ignored on its release in 1982, it was unexpectedly hailed as one of the 20 greatest post-war American novels by the British Book Marketing Council (the same people who bought us the inaugural Best of Young British Writers list).

The novel’s protagonist is Dorothy, a housewife whose marriage is failing. Her son, Scotty, died young, of complications from routine surgery, and her husband Fred is frequently absent. He claims to be working late, but Dorothy suspects him of having an affair. The couple sleep in different beds, and inhabit different rooms in their house. Psychologically, she is showing signs of extreme stress – she hears strange, personal messages in radio broadcasts: ‘the first time was during a commercial for cake-mix and the woman’s voice had said in a perfectly ordinary tone, ‘don’t worry Dorothy, you’ll have another baby all right. All you need to do is relax and stop worrying about it’.

This isn’t the strangest message she hears on the wireless; one day, a news report includes a bulletin about ‘Aquarius the Monsterman’, ‘a giant lizard-like animal capable of living both underwater and on dry land’ which has attacked its keepers and escaped. That evening, as she makes spaghetti bolognese for Fred and a colleague, there is a knock at her door, and the ‘monsterman’ walks in.

Ingalls’ style puts the Realist in Magical Realist. A practical woman, Dorothy immediately assimilates the fact of the giant amphibian into her life. It is established that he prefers to be known as 'Larry', that he is housetrained, and has a fondness for vegetables. He is also frightened. Far from rampaging through the country, as the radio reports suggested, he is seeking sanctuary from his captors: 'They will kill me. I have suffered so much already'. This need stirs something in Dorothy. In The Tempest, Caliban says of Prospero ‘you taught me language, and how to curse’; by contrast, Dorothy goes about teaching Larry how to drive, and do the housework.  By stressing these aspects of their relationship, Ingalls’ narrative raises an interesting question about masculinity, and desire.

Although it is never made explicit, there is the possibility that Larry exists solely in Dorothy’s head, a kind of mental wish-fulfilment. Regardless, he appears at a time when she is feeling vulnerable and alone. Larry’s huge bulk, and primal appearance, leads the reader to assume that he will represent some form of sturdy, physical manliness, a contrast to the insubstantial-seeming Fred. In fact, though, Larry couldn’t be further from the cliché of the red-meat eating ‘real man’. His diet is akin to ‘that of the average man on a health-food kick' - more avocados than steaks. He notices little changes in Dorothy’s appearance (‘You think [this dress] is fancier? And my hair this way?’), and helps around the house ('he enjoyed housework. He was good at it, and found it interesting').

Larry and Dorothy have a sexual relationship, but even this is complex. They sleep together in every room of the house, several times a day at first. Dorothy finds this new regime is 'just the right amount for me. It's perfect'. But Larry’s experiences of sex are coloured by his experiences at the research centre, where he was subject to sexual humiliations by his handlers. Larry is a surrogate son, as much as a husband replacement; he is rendered vulnerable by his past mistreatment, so that Dorothy feels even his polite manners are ‘as poignant as if they had been scars on his body’; he is to be protected, and cossetted from the hardships of the outside world like a toddler. Although this is not stressed during the narrative, it opens the book up to some interesting Freudian interpretations.

A long way from home, trapped in a confusing and hostile environment (it is not safe for him to walk the streets at night, even with the wigs and cosmetic masks Dorothy supplies), Larry's situation mirrors Dorothy’s sense of alienation. Although the novel is set decades later, Dorothy’s experiences in the home mirror those described by Betty Friedan in The Feminine Mystique. The arrival of a sympathetic presence in her life allows Dorothy to begin thinking of the future again, Larry’s strangely calming influence helping her to focus on something more than the domestic. She begins to assert herself in her relationship with her husband and in-laws, and even contemplates becoming pregnant by her amphibian lover, allowing Ingalls to gleefully satirise the American Dream: ‘born on American soil, to an American mother – such a child could become President’. 

At the same time as Dorothy’s anthropomorphic adultery is going on, her friend Estelle is also engaged in a complex relationship with two men, both of whom repeatedly propose marriage. Although Estelle appears to be liberated and glamorous, the sight of her two lovers escorting younger women at a fashion show makes her re-evaluate her position: ‘I wasn’t the one who kept asking to get married. That’s what makes it so horrible. They’ve got to have somebody to do all their domestic drudgery full-time, and substitutes when the fancy one is out with somebody better’. Estelle’s realisation propels this short novella towards its denouement. Beginning to kick against their domestic confinement, Dorothy and Larry begin roaming farther afield, placing themselves in potentially harmful situations.

Mrs Caliban still feels fresh more than three decades on, and could well be due a revival. There is an appetite now for novels which chart the breakup of marriages from a female perspective, and Ingalls brings elements of satire and surrealism to the topic. Fans of recent novels like Season to Taste or Lightning Rods would enjoy this wryly subversive novella; who knows, with the right backing maybe it could the surprise hit of the summer?