**Review Part One: Coming-of-age and Much, Much More**
Sang Pak's "Wait Until Twilight" is a coming-of-age story, and it is much more. It is also, in part, a "surrealist" narrative of coming-to-self-understanding. That is, the story reflects a complex set of psychological processes, of which the main character is largely unconscious at the beginning of the novel, but which are outwardly enacted by and gradually understood by the main character. Sang Pak's development and integration of these two genres -- a moving coming-of-age story and an intricate, surrealist process of self-understanding -- is quite ingenious and is executed with stunning brilliance.
Another excellent example of the latter genre is Chuck Palahniuk's "Fight Club." "Wait Until Twilight," however, offers something quite different than a multiple-personality plot-twist as a strategy for narrating and explaining the development of its characters and plot. In a key sequence (pp. 185-189), we find Samuel Polk, the novel's 16-year-old main character, sitting in on a college psychology class for his older brother, and we learn about a female psychologist and novelist who wrote "dark fairy tales" to illustrate her views on archetypal processes of psychological development. "Wait Until Twilight" is precisely this sort "dark fairy tale," characterized by the unfolding of psychological conflicts and resolutions.
"Wait Until Twilight" achieves a fine balance here: it explains the archetypal psychology at work in Samuel just enough to enable the reader put the psychological puzzle pieces of Samuel's story together; yet it refrains from psychological explanation enough to leave the fitting-together of the puzzle pieces open to interpretation. To be clear, Pak does not use Samuel's coming-of-age story to expound some psychological theory that Pak has developed: rather, these bits of pieces psychology serve as a self-reflexive mode of character and plot exposition that Pak folds neatly into the novel itself. For more spoiler-free general comments, see "Review Part Two" below.
**Summary Part One: Basic Plot Details**
(No major spoilers)
At the very beginning of the story, we learn in passing that Samuel Polk's mother died a year before the novel begins. 16-year-old Samuel says he's over it. Samuel and his friend are on their way to see three grossly disfigured babies (siblings) that Samuel might use for a video assignment. Samuel finds the babies viscerally repugnant, and drops the idea of using them for his video. Yet, he develops a "sick curiosity" about the babies, voyeuristically wanting to see them again -- just to look at them. And he's reminded of them at every turn: his thoughts obsessively find a way back to think about the babies.
However, Samuel's "sick curiosity" is complex and ambivalent, and it psychologically mirrors the difference between the babies' mother and their twenty-something, "normal" brother, Daryl. On the one hand, the mother is disgusted by Samuel's reaction to seeing the children, and Samuel likewise finds his repugnance repugnant. As well, he wants to make sure that the babies are "okay," that they are properly cared for despite the impoverished state in which the family lives, but the mother banishes Samuel from the house. On the other hand, Samuel -- like Daryl -- continues to find the babies repugnant in a powerful way: "monster-babies" that shouldn't be alive. Samuel's ambivalent and impulsive feelings, and his investigative attempts get back into the house, propel him headlong into dark sympathies with as well as violent conflicts with Daryl.
But why are Samuel's feelings about the babies so powerful, how does he resolve those conflicting feelings, and how does he resolve his intensely conflictual relationship with Daryl? And what does all this have to do with Samuel's recurring thoughts about his mother, and his recurring statements that he's "over it"?
**Summary Part Two: The Interwoven Archetypal "Fairy Tale"**
WARNING: BEGIN SPOILERS
After learning about "sexuality as initiation," "character repugnance," "character acceptance," etc. in his brother's psychology class, Samuel's surrealist coming-to-self-understanding begins. His coming-of-age experience of sex with Naomi, a college girl, is his developmental "initiation." Through it, he feels like he's become "the primal man," which begins to free him from something he's "repressing" deep down. Then he sees, "Vampire Incarnation," an anime movie in which civilized humans must become vampire-like to kill the vampires that have taken over their world. Daryl is the inhumane, murderous vampire in Samuel's world. If Samuel is to confront Daryl, Samuel must "un-repress" his own "primal" side and he must unleash his own inhumane and violent side -- unleash his internal vampire. For Samuel, this process begins with a conflict with Naomi's boyfriend, which serves a as a prelude and precursor to Samuel's battle to the death with Daryl.
With Samuel's external vampire dead and reduced to ashes, Samuel's own internal vampire begins to die as well -- for it was Daryl who represented and drew out Samuel's violent and inhumane side. By becoming violent and inhumane in the murder of Daryl, for which Daryl's mother is equally responsible, this side of Samuel is not cultivated but purged. And becoming "primal" perhaps has two meanings here: relating not only to carnal sex and violence but also to Samuel's opportunity to "start over" in certain respects. For it is at this point that Samuel returns to his relationship to the babies, to his mother's death, and to Melody and begins to grow in new directions.
First, then, becoming unlike Daryl, Samuel becomes more humane and more human, turning from "repugnance" at the "monster" babies to "accepting" them as they are -- as "human" as he is.
Second, at the center of Samuel's development is the coming-of-age realization and confession -- the release of what's repressed, the release of the source of Samuel's inhumane side. Samuel confesses to Melody that, in a youthful and disrespectful but not malicious way, he ignored and abandoned his mother as she was dying of cancer. As her health declined, Samuel came to see her as no longer human, as a "vegetable." So guilt-riddled was his experience of his actions that he felt he had killed his mother and saw himself as a despicable "monster." It was, in a sense, his own "monstrosity" that he saw in the babies, and the repugnance he experienced toward them reflected the repugnance he felt about his own inhumane "monstrosity." Samuel says to Melody: "I was the monster... that I wanted to destroy." In connection with his changed perception of the babies, having come to see them as human, Samuel comes to see himself as human again -- no longer a "monster." He kept all these feelings bottled-up and repressed, deep down, but they are now conscious and out in the open as he confesses to Melody. By confessing to Melody his perceptions of himself as inhuman(e) and monstrous, Samuel is again engaged in a process of becoming human -- purging these self-perceptions from himself. In this way, Samuel begins to come to terms with his experiences of the maternal loss that he's been saying he's "over" since Page #1 of the novel, and Melody is for Samuel, at that moment, a maternal figure through which he can experience a reconciliation.
Finally, Samuel's sense of his inhumanity and monstrosity in relation to his mother had prevented him from feeling affection for Melody and becoming close to her: they had always remained strangely distant from one another, and Samuel had done his part to keep it that way. Now, however, Samuel confesses his sense of his inhumanity to Melody, opening up and becoming closer to her. Melody, in turn, embraces him, and on the final page of the novel Samuel eschews his usual high school lunchroom clique to sit with Melody, giving him "a good feeling that [he] can't understand at all." Thus, Samuel has only partially come to terms with the way Melody is a maternal figure for him and with the affection that he feels for her. With respect to Samuel's relationships to both his mother and to Melody, "Wait Until Twilight" ends, appropriately, at the beginning or middle of complex processes of partial self-understanding. Despite certain appearances, the resolution here is by no means complete.
END SPOILERS
**Review Part Two**
(No major spoilers)
In addition to the merits addressed in the first part of my review, "Wait Until Twilight" skillfully and successfully employs a narrative strategy of putting the reader in Samuel's position, such that we learn about Samuel's psychological development only as he becomes conscious of it himself. As a result, the reader must reconsider the beginning and middle of the story from the perspective of the greater self-understanding that Samuel achieves at the end of the novel.
As well, there is a certain open-endedness that Pak gives to Samuel's coming-of-age experience. For example, at the conclusion of the novel, we see that Samuel does not entirely understand his feelings for Melody, his maternal high school love interest: he does not entirely understand either the way she is a maternal figure for him or the nature of his affection for Melody. In this sense, Pak's novel, again, is as much about coming-of-age as it is about coming-to-self-understanding, which Pak rightly leaves as an open-ended process.
To be sure, coming-to-self-understanding is, in Pak's novel, set in the context of teen-age years and contains the sorts of events that define the coming-of-age genre. On the other hand, coming-to-self-understanding has no age limits, nor do the psychological processes with which the novel deals.
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