FICTION
‘The Opposite of Everyone’
by Joshilyn Jackson
William Morrow/HarperCollinsPublishers
304 pages, $26.99
Paula Vauss is the type of ruthless Atlanta divorce attorney we love to hate and learn to love.
Dig the improvised pitch she makes to a noxious, upmarket client: “You want to take that company he’s so proud of, and hack it up, and set the bits on fire. Make him watch while we sell the burning pieces for a chunk of capital. You want to raze his fields and salt his earth so nothing ever grows there again … You want your own small sins explained, so it’s clear you were driven to them. By him.”
Winning, in every way, is it not?
And winning is what 35-year-old Paula Vauss is all about, until the day a middle class white kid named Julian Bouchard turns up at her Midtown law firm. He’s toting a thick file that confirms his status as Paula’s surprise brother. Just as startling, the papers reveal a preteen “sudden sister,” Hana, who may be traveling with the trio’s mother, Kai, a cosmic drifter who is dying of cancer.
Prompted by Julian to locate Hana, Paula dispatches the bibulous “trained investigator,” Zachary Birdwine, her off-again, on-again boyfriend. With its bang-bang tempo, “The Opposite of Everyone,” the seventh novel from Decatur’s rough-and-ready Joshilyn Jackson, seems to proceed as a satisfying rescue quest for a missing sibling and an errant mom. Yet, if detective fiction gives it reliable form, “The Opposite of Everyone” is elevated by a parallel shadow structure of a heroic Hindu story that radiates the events of Paula’s life without too much magical contrivance.
Kai’s interest in Hinduism — she is retelling the ancient Vedic epic, the “Ramayana” — inspired the original names for her children: Paula was Kali, the bipolar deity in the Hindu pantheon. Julian was named Ganesh, after the elephant god; Hana is derived from Hanuman, the monkey god. According to R.E. Zaehner’s “Hinduism,” Kali’s dual aspect is “terrible” and “auspicious”; she is the “universal murderess of all she has brought forth.” (Images depict Kali brandishing scimitars, her belt an ornamentation of severed heads.)
Whatever may have been Kai’s maternal inadequacy, she is a powerful storyteller: “Even my bedtime stories (were) spectacular,” Paula says. “Old South folklore dipped in Hindu poetry and god tales.” Her mom’s fabulation shaped the person Paula would become, despite her resistance to the notion of cyclical time.
“It’s a story that happened a long time ago,” recites Kai, “but it’s still happening now.”
Like Julian, and probably Hana, Paula never knew her father’s identity. She describes herself as “coppery-skinned” and “of murky racial origin.” Her unstable youth was spent wandering in the fissures of down-and-out Reagan America with Kai, who played out a string of half-baked artistic boyfriends, scattered around the South.
Paula longed to be a “single unit” with her mother, but “Kai (didn’t) love me like she (loved) her boyfriends.” As she entered her teen years, mother and daughter landed in Paulding County, living with a dope farmer until Paula ratted him out to the cops.
It was a betrayal with unintended consequences: Kai was sentenced to two years in jail, Paula consigned to a harsh “group home” in East Atlanta.
The novel is sometimes powered by coincidence; not-so-great expectations find a way to work out, no matter what. An arch-foe from Paula’s brutal foster home years rematerializes as a social worker who steers Paula and Julian toward Hana. Logically, “The Opposite of Everyone” equals “no one,” which is what Paula and her former teenage adversary might have become: “Children of the Edge” falling “past the world turtle into an endless darkness.”
More exactly, the title means the opposite within everyone. It’s on the battlefield inside Paula’s oscillating Kali persona — the fierce, self-oriented lawyer determined to offer her baby sister the home that she never had — where Jackson’s novel gathers full-strength. Paula can be condescending, boasting about the luxurious white sofa she buys to match her cat; but when her brother sniffs at Zachary Birdwine’s dilapidated home, she explodes, “You think Birdwine’s not our kind. I get it. But, Julian, there is no our kind for you and me.” She loves Birdwine, provisionally, even if in the past she hasn’t given her “personal relationships with men a lot of brain space.”
In “The Opposite of Everyone,” the potential for spiritual rigmarole is held in check by confrontations with an unscrupulous sleuth and a thieving husband whose wife is “halfway up the crazy stairs.” Jackson lobs piquant social asides like splintering shafts of orange zest: gentrification in some parts of town “is a failing work in progress.” But her close observations about the changing city are more often occasions for a lonesome mood or poetic reverie: the sad nostalgia of Kai’s “dim basement apartment” on Morningside Drive in the 1990s; the exquisite Baudelairian moment triggered by the view from Paula’s expensive Midtown loft: “I could see Atlanta’s skyline spread out before us in an electric dazzle, as if the city had set itself alight inside the blackness strictly for our pleasure.”
To say that Kai was an irresponsible parent would be to deny the quirky family restoration that may turn out to have been her cockeyed master plan all along, a design foreshadowed in the cryptic note she sends to Paula prior to Julian’s arrival: “Death is not the end. You will be the end.” This is the destiny that Paula Vauss embraces in “The Opposite of Everyone.”
