69 pages • 2 hours read
Victor LavalleThe Changeling: A Novel
Fiction | Novel | Adult | Published in 2017A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Background
Authorial Context: Victor LaValle
LaValle is best known for his speculative writing. However, he began his literary career writing realistic fiction. His first two books—the collection of stories Slapboxing with Jesus, which was published in 1999, and the 2002 novel, The Ecstatic—offered social commentary on the lives of young Black men who deal with mental health conditions, racism, and other issues.
Though both works delved into dark and intense themes, it wasn’t until 2009 that LaValle introduced a surreal frame to his writing with his second novel, Big Machine. The main character in this book is the survivor of a suicide cult, and he is invited to join a group of paranormal investigators called the Unlikely Scholars. All of the Scholars have experienced social difficulties at some point in the past, and this element continues the theme that LaValle explored in his earlier works.
His next two works continued in this trend by leaning more into elements of horror and social commentary at the same time. LaValle’s 2012 novel, The Devil in Silver, is set in a psychiatric hospital and follows a character who must overcome the Devil as he roams the halls of the institute. In 2016, LaValle wrote and published a novella titled The Ballad of Black Tom, which revises H. P. Lovecraft’s story, “The Horror at Red Hook,” by viewing its events from the perspective of a Black protagonist. By doing so, LaValle interrogates the racist assumptions in Lovecraft’s story while retaining the sense of strangeness that made the older writer’s work so popular in the first place.
Much like LaValle’s earlier works, The Changeling examines modern social issues through a speculative lens. The novel looks at contemporary behaviors around parenting and examines how they are affected by technology and changing gender roles. It also traces how parental concerns are rooted in ancient myths and fairy tales. In doing so, LaValle invites the possibility that his story is also a fairy tale.
Genre Context: Modern Fairy Tales
In contemporary literature, modern fairy tales derive from classical children’s stories either by retelling them from a slightly skewed perspective or by taking the popular tropes of the genre and using them to construct an entirely new story. This approach to storytelling is Postmodernist by design. It relies on the reader’s prior knowledge of older stories and tropes to interrogate the hierarchies that informed the older texts, especially of race, sexuality, and gender. This, in turn, illuminates the function and rationale behind storytelling while also allowing readers to appreciate old stories in a newer context. For instance, the 2019 novel Gingerbread by British writer Helen Oyeyemi is a retelling of the German fairy tale “Hansel and Gretel,” and the 2015 short story “Little Man” by Michael Cunningham reimagines “Rumpelstiltskin.” Similarly, the British short story writer Angela Carter used classic fairy tales such as “Bluebeard” and “Beauty and the Beast” as the basis for the stories in her 1979 collection, The Bloody Chamber.
LaValle’s The Changeling fits into this tradition—it imbibes a sense of magic into a grounded world. The novel begins by describing itself as a “fairy tale,” and it includes traditional fairy tale characters like witches and trolls. However, until the end, the novel’s various characters wonder if magic is real or if it is an interpretation of things that might simply be considered improbable. When the novel ends, it even includes a twist on the “happily ever after” ending that often marks fairy tales—in this version, characters realize that happiness might be fleeting, but that this doesn’t make it any less important.
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