The Midnight Library and Permanent Solutions -- A Paired Review
Let me start by saying that I’m never biased about anything. Other people are biased, but not me. So, when in this review of The Midnight Library by Matt Haig, I compare it somewhat unfairly to the stage-show Permanent Solutions, which includes in its cast one of my best friends in all the world, please understand that the judgment is objective and absolute, and her involvement is a factor only insofar as that I might never have heard of and seen the play if she hadn’t been in it.
With that out of the way, Permanent Solutions by first-time playwright Cass Caduto is doing a lot of what The Midnight Library is trying to do, albeit in a different way, and I would argue more successfully. The subject matter for both works, of course, is suicide, with strong undertones of regret. Actually, in the case of The Midnight Library, it’s not so much strong undertones as humongous crashing waves hurling bricks into your face– there is a literal “Book of Regrets”, after all. The plot of The Midnight Library maintains more or less this same level of subtlety throughout. Nora Seed, who has a name which sounds like a pun but isn’t, has a disappointing life for several different reasons (regrets, really… I wonder if maybe those are all written down in a book somewhere?), after which she finds herself in an infinite, mysterious library. At midnight. A “midnight library”, if you will. On all the shelves are seemingly identical books, and waiting to meet her is a phantasm of her childhood librarian-friend, Ms. Elm. This psychopomp of sorts explains that each of the books contains an alternate version of Nora’s life in which she made some choice differently at some point or another, extrapolated forward to the present moment. It’s Nora’s job now to search through the books for a life she’d rather live than the one she’s just tried to abandon, and to live that life instead. When I read this, I became convinced that Matt Haig was going to do something really crazy and unexpected here, because the obvious ending is just too obvious to be seriously pursued; it’s the same ending that every other piece of media which has attempted this sort of plotline has settled upon, and to be clear there are an absurd number of other pieces of media which has attempted this sort of plotline, the “let’s look at all the different ways my life could have gone and choose between them”. I’ve seen this in Saturday morning cartoons, countless “deep” and “thought-provoking” web-shorts, I’ve read it in short-stories, I’ve even heard it in a song or two– Ernie from Sesame Street singing to us “Oh, I’d like to visit the moon…” comes fondly to my heart. And much like Ernie decides that “It’s nice to look down at the Earth from above, I would miss all the places and people I love. So although I might like it for one afternoon, I don’t want to live on the moon”. At the end of the book, Nora chooses her own life, the same one she started out in. It’s almost a double-subversion actually– an ending so obvious that the author couldn’t possibly have chosen it, could he? And yet, and yet, and yet.
It’s worth pointing out as well that there’s a lot of “Let us walk together through the events of your life” exposition in this book. In some instances, it’s forgivable. It makes sense, for example, for the specter of Ms. Elm to do this because of course she’s acting as psychopomp and life-chooser. It makes sense as well for some people in Nora’s alternate lives to do this because she jumps into these new lives with no real knowledge of how it’s progressed up until that moment, which does lead to some admittedly funny and awkward circumstances. But even before her entry into the library, characters are doing this. Nora is called into a meeting with her boss at the music store where she works, and he just sort of bluntly questions her about where her life has gone and how much potential she’s wasted, having her verbally confirm for him the details of her childhood and young adulthood, and then he fires her. It’s a rare treat to see writing so clumsy. There were two moments of extreme interest-grabbing for me that I have to acknowledge, however. The first was when Nora, in one of her alternate lives, encountered a fellow “Slider”, someone in a “midnight-library-situation” of their own, sliding between their own multiple lives in search of a better path. This is made interesting in one way, and it is wasted in another. What is interesting is the nihilism of her fellow slider, who has come to enjoy the process of moving between lives more than the actual hope of finding the right life to stay in. Sliding, so to speak, has become his way of life– and for a little while, it’s Nora’s too, and I quite enjoyed that sequence. What is wasted, unfortunately, is the sheer eeriness of these encounters (or “sheeriness”, as I like to call it). Hugo and Nora’s relationship is barely explored beyond mere camaraderie, and we never encounter any other sliders besides him. This is a book that wants to be a movie. I don’t mean that in the sense that this is a book that ought to have a movie made of it. Rather, this reads to me as a book that knows that books are often made into movies, and has taken as many steps as it can in its construction to try and make that happen. Many of the set-pieces, little moments, and the like (the way the library moves, for instance, despite itself being quite unoriginal; think of that scene in The Matrix when Neo and Trinity are picking out their guns to rescue Morpheus– as well, the way Ms. Elm is able to summon the books from the shelves calls to mind Marvel’s Thor and Mjolnir). Thematically, too, the book is playing to “Hollywood” ideas about suicide. “Suicide is bad, it’s the wrong choice, the life you are living is the best life for you, make the most of it, it’s never too late”, and so on and so forth. And there’s definitely a little something to be said for this. It’s certainly better than out-and-out glorifying/fetishizing suicide (a la Netlix’s Thirteen Reasons Why), and it’s been done to pretty good effect elsewhere; Ned Vizzini’s It’s Kind of a Funny Story, for instance (which my dear friend mentioned above first introduced me to– again, entirely a coincidence. I filled out a quiz on Buzzfeed about whether or not I was being biased in my book-review, and it said that I definitely wasn’t). But it is what it is, and it is what you expect, almost beat-for-beat.
Permanent Solutions is not.
The play has two characters, primarily, staying overnight in the same hospital-room. They have both chosen to end their own lives, and in so doing they are participating in an interesting experiment/study/drug trial (not altogether clear); they are given two pills, one at the start of the evening and one in the morning. After taking the second pill, they will die. One of the characters is gruff and standoffish, the other is bubbly and open. The gruff one complains about the bubbles. The bubbly one tries to cut through the gruffness and extract a life story. Throughout the play, both characters’ life-stories come out, bit by bit, and I won’t do you the disservice of spoiling them here, but it is enough to say that they hit. Hard. When I first watched this play, I had an inkling that the bubbly one was a plant, an undisclosed part of the experiment designed to somehow convince the gruff one out of suicide. But by the end, it’s the gruff one begging Ms. Bubbles not to kill herself, to leave the hospital and join her as a roommate, start building a new, better life together (oops, nevermind, I’m spoiling it after all), and Ms. Bubbles refusing, arguing that her bipolar disorder is a life-sentence of misery that neither she nor anyone else signed up for. She leaves the room to take her second pill and die. Her companion collapses sobbing, but admits that if people want to leave this world, maybe they have “the right to”.
Yep.
You didn’t read it wrong.
Permanent Solutions defends suicide. And not in the medical-drama way of “old age is suffering, it’s not murder for a doctor to put someone out of their misery”, yada yada.
No, this is the real deal, the full moral plunge. Sometimes, it is okay to choose to kill yourself because you are unhappy. Your body and your life are yours and yours alone, and it’s not for anyone else to force you to exist.
I can honestly say I have never encountered this perspective before in fiction– though I’ve certainly had conversations along these lines once or twice– and there’s something refreshing about it. It doesn’t encourage suicide, mind you. It simply accepts it. These characters’ paths to where they now find themselves is long and complicated and shown to us in bits and pieces, and it’s clear that this is not a choice either of them have made lightly. It’s not impulsive, it’s not fueled by raw mania or youthful hormones or singular crisis-events. It’s two people who have sat back and made honest evaluations of their lives, and found them to be intractably painful. I cannot emphasize enough how stunning this is to see executed– particularly on stage. Permanent Solutions is in many ways the polar opposite of The Midnight Library— where Haig’s work says what everyone thinks they are supposed to say, Caduto’s play says what’s in our heads that nobody is willing to say. If that’s not art, I don’t know what is.
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