The Deck Is Stacked Against You

Review – “The Cloisters” by Katy Hays

I feel like I have to make some sort of joke about this book being a “Cloister”fuck because, I mean, who wouldn’t, but I would be lying.  At least partly.

The story is good, nothing revolutionary, but it’s quick paced and short enough that I was able to finish it in a weekend.  What seems like a straightforward occult-ish mystery goes totally batshit within the last ten pages, which eventually results in the realization that you just spent 300 pages reading about a bunch of totally garbage people, but we’ll get there.

The Cloisters, if you aren’t from the NYC-area and don’t already know, is an extension of the Met housing loads of awesome medieval art in a recreated monastery (it’s actually pieces of multiple old buildings).  There’s gardens, statues, paintings, tchotchkes, and generally just lots of cool stuff.  It’s a whole vibe, and as good a place to just hang out and chill as it is to actually look at art.  So naturally, it’s like the perfect setting for a spooky-ish tarot murder mystery.

I should mention that while the book is blurbed as being tarot-focused, I found the use of tarot in the story as more peripheral than anything – it’s a plot device for the central mystery, but honestly I feel like almost anything could have been inserted in its place and it wouldn’t have missed a beat.  In short, I think I was expecting a little more mysticism and less realism.

I’ve mentioned a couple of times in other reviews that I think fantasy-in-the-realm-of-reality functions really well for me because it’s relatable escapism.  I love anything that helps me to believe in the possibility of magic existing in the real world, because at this point I’ve pretty much given up on the hope of finding a passage way to some mystical realm.

So back to tarot and its place in the story – I kept thinking that the big magic reveal was right around the corner – the cards that are the focal point, the McGuffin, if you will, are actually magical and are manipulating the cast of characters the whole time.  No….they’re just cards, and “the big reveal” turns out to be that they’re proof that renaissance folks used them for mystical purposes, not originally as a card game (which is standard origin story at this point); this being the renaissance, the reliance on occultism is a big deal for historians.  Soooo, cool, sure, but I personally wanted a little more woo woo.

I think the reason I wanted a little more woo woo is because without it I was just reading yet another artsy-fartsy novel populated with over-educated privileged white hipsters that took place almost exclusively uptown.  Our protagonist Ann is sort of positioned to be this smalltown every-girl but she spends so much time bemoaning her small-town origins and her desire to escape to something “better” that it’s really, really hard to feel sorry for her even during the times when she’s being legitimately treated like shit by the NYC art snobs she’s so desperate to impress.  It’s very much “The Devil Wears Prada”, just set in museums instead of fashion publishing.

Granted, her mother is a whack job agoraphobic who’s a tad too restrictive, but instead of trying to just talk to the woman, Ann pretty much cuts and runs, soon after the death of her father, and proceeds to ignore mom for weeks at a time.  Like, I’m Italian-American raised Catholic so believe me, I get the overbearing mom stuff, but you at least must try to hash out your differences with a parent (assuming they’re not abusive, because I would blame anybody for fucking right off in that case) because to do otherwise is borderline sociopathic and makes a main character extremely difficult to like.

This is kind of ironic, because when the actual (non-mystical) big reveal comes, it turns out that Ann is just as garbage as you thought.  She spends so much time trying to better and bigger than where she came from, to find some place to fit the way she sees herself, and ultimately, she does wind up doing that, just not in a good way.  The real reveal (not including the spoilerly stuff surrounding her father’s death) is that she’s every bit as opportunistic and greedy as her NYC “betters”; she’s essentially just another piece of trash on what many would consider the biggest trash heap in the world.

I’m not sure if the author intended this as some sort of didactic parable, or if we’re still actually supposed to feel bad for Ann at the end.  Objectively she’s less awful than Rachel (who is exactly the person you think she is, and that is spoiling absolutely nothing).  Are we supposed to be coming out of this book reaffirming our beliefs that the over-privileged really are as bad as we assume they are? 

I don’t think that’s the point, by the way.  Given that a lot of these novels set in the inner world of metropolitan richies are written by folks that have origins in those spaces, I’m never sure whether they’re critiquing them or just writing what they know.  If they’re critiquing, I think we’re meant to come out of this with the idea that all that glitters isn’t gold, yada yada.  If the author is just writing what they know, then I think we can safely assume that this is really a treatise on fate, chance, coincidence, and why even if magic isn’t real, there’s no point trying to wrap your head around why things happen the way they do.  I think the best questions it asks is whether it’s worth knowing the truth, if it was possible to divine the future.

Personally, I’ve never really viewed tarot as a divinatory tool so much as an intuitive tool/method by which we can either use to help us trust our own intuition more, or just guide us towards what our options might be when the waters get murky.  There’s comfort in reaffirming what you already know, even if you don’t know you know it.  Also, the pictures are pretty.