"She wished she could tell Maria that it was all right. That she didn't need to be sorry anymore. That she'd done something Delilah could never have had the strength to do. She wished Maria were here, so she could tell her. So she could tell her she understood" (Talley 370).The highly competitive atmosphere of a private boarding school made total sense to me as a place where ambition and betrayal could run rampant. Acheron Academy is housed in an old plantation filled with old ghosts, haunting tales of death, spirits that dance over water, power outages that thrust the dorms into darkness at every turn. In short, the supernatural is crawling off of every page of Robin Talley's As I Descended.
Similar to CFA, students at Acheron are often overwhelmed by the pressures of AP classes and GPAs and getting into the "right" college. Maria Lyon is an excellent soccer player, number 2 in her class, and popular among her peers. Her roommate and girlfriend, Lily Boiten, is a brilliant student headed to Stanford after graduation. Lily is disabled, unable to walk properly after suffering an accident during her middle school years. Lily fears her family will not approve of their relationship, so they keep their romance a secret - except for telling Brandon, Maria's best male friend who is also gay. The girls want nothing more than to ensure Maria's entrance into Stanford as well, so they can be together in college. They know if Maria can win the Kingsley Prize - an award that guarantees college entrance to anywhere in the country - then there is no question they will be together. Only one thing stands in their way - Delilah Dufrey who is already considered a shoo-in for the Kingsley as first in her class, captain of the soccer team, and leader of the student body.
While there are clearly differences in the setting and conflict of the novel and the play Macbeth, there are many similarities. The novel begins with Maria, Lily, and Brandon - Maria's best friend - holding a Ouija board session in the likely haunted dining hall of the academy. Spirits seemingly hijack the board and write words in Spanish which only Maria really understands. The board spells out "you will have what you most desire" and "that which is [hers] is yours" along with some other ambiguous statements (22). As you can guess, after this night, Lily convinces Maria that Delilah needs to be taken out. The plan is to drug Delilah's drink, so she will not pass the upcoming "surprise" drug test. Unfortunately, things go awry when the drug Lily bought from the campus drug dealer turns out to be LSD and not Ecstasy. Delilah hallucinates and ends up jumping from a 4th story window. She does not die, but ends up in a coma and is taken out of the running for the Kingsley Prize. From here, the plot follows the trajectory of the play in that Brandon (Maria's best friend who knows Maria took drugs from Delilah's purse the night of the accident) is killed and Mateo (Brandon's boyfriend) is suspicious of Maria and exposes her deception. Maria and Lily's relationship and sanity unravel as they both battle the guilt over what they have done. Talley structures her novel into 5 sections to mirror the 5 acts of Shakespeare's play. She also uses a short quotation from the play to introduce each chapter - beginning with "a charms wound up" and ending with "tomorrow tomorrow tomorrow." Sprinkled in throughout the novel are also other key words and phrases and motifs from the play - most notably Maria's repetition of "blood will have blood" that is originally communicated to her in Spanish from what she thinks is the dead spirit of Altagracia, her childhood nanny (293). Both Maria and Lily can't stand the sight or thought of blood ever since the night of Delilah's "accident."
While similarities abound, some key differences in the novel made the book more interesting to consider. Having a couple that was comprised of two females versus male/female created a sharp contrast in terms of the way Lily was able to influence Maria. There is no shaming as there is with Lady Macbeth; rather, Lily plays up the fact that Delilah hurt Lily earlier in their high school career, leading her on as if she was interested in her romantically and then making her feel ashamed. Lily plays on Maria's compassion and sympathy towards her. Delilah - unlike Duncan - is also somewhat undeserving of her position in the school. She uses opioids to party every weekend; she slept with the soccer coach in order to be named captain; she is thought to have cheated to achieve high grades in her classes. Lily emphasizes that it is wrong for Delilah to have all she has when Maria is so much more deserving through her general kindness and hard work. Maria feels frustrated by this injustice as well, but is hesitant to do something unjust in return: "Lily was right. It should have been Maria the whole time. All of it should have been hers. With Delilah out of the way, Maria could have everything she's ever wanted. This was too good to be true. Wait" (71). It is her desire to ensure her placement with Lily in college that serves as the final push to her agreement to drug Delilah's drink.
Another key contrast in this story is that much of the mayhem and death that occurs feels much less controllable; while there is some intent on Maria's part, she does not intend for Delilah to be physically hurt. Similarly, Brandon's death is very ambiguous. Maria communes with spirits again and ask for their help, and Brandon suffers a kind of heart attack which he describes during the event as feeling "like he was lying under a brick wall" (200). In the end, when Mateo finally confronts Maria, she actually dies through a lightening strike that Mateo survives and she does not. At the exact time Maria dies, Delilah awakens from her coma in the hospital. All of these factors very much made it feel like Maria was somewhat a victim to the evil forces around her, more of a pawn than an active participant.
As I write this post, I have been trying to put my finger on what I did not like about the novel As I Descended. I think it mostly had to do with Talley's writing style. Her style is very sparse with little detail or imagery. Her dialogue feels somewhat forced and - perhaps more than anything - I did not feel the relationship between Maria and Lily that so drives everything in this story. Perhaps more character development or focus on leading up to the conflict would have helped with this? I did enjoy the fact that while many characters are homosexual in the novel, the book is not "about" being gay. The more books that are written like this, the more we can begin to break down the walls that only heterosexual relationships are normative. Similarly, Lily's character being disabled was interesting because the book does not address this except to perhaps suggest many thought of her as
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