Using humor to tell difficult truths about ourselves and society’s woes (Murbridge, fictional town in Western Massachusetts, 2019): “The turn of a doorknob, the beat of a heart.” One minute your life is on track, the next it’s plummeted off the rails. That’s the serious premise of Tara Conklin’s new contemporary novel in which she takes on the role of comedian to deliver hard truths disguised as humor.
COVID triggered, prepare to fall under the spell of magical mushrooms and absurdist reactions to traumatic events. On the surface, Community Board imagines a lost soul character in the throes of a nervous breakdown after an out-of-the-blue divorce that devastates twenty-nine-year-old Darcy Clipper’s safe life, setting off two other major life crises: feeling abandoned by her BF parents and job loss. Forty pages – that’s all it takes to destroy one’s sense of self.
The truth is Darcy’s wild tale reflects the emotional trauma of millions, greater than the 50% of marriages winding up in divorce Conklin cites. Technology contributing to the growing sense of disconnect: the loss of the “human touch,” free-for-all breaking norms, wildfire conspiracy theories, our moral compass. Quarantining exacerbated and magnified what’s been happening to how we communicate, affecting so many aspects of our lives.
Revolving a novel around a fictitious community board app (dozens of real ones, e.g. https://alternativeto.net/feature/message-board/) is a clever, charming, eccentric, and increasingly ominous way to illuminate online life.
Contrasted by the offline, in-person town meetings that also take place in a novel inspired by Conklin’s real hometown in Stockbridge, MA (she’s originally from St. Croix, US Virgin Islands). A 300-year-old New England tradition that “keeps true democracy alive.”
“Hear ye, Hear ye” is the cry of the elected Board of Selectmen gaveling a Town Hall meeting in a small Massachusetts town. It’s also the attention-getting voice of a writer who also assumes the role of social psychologist. Darcy has self-diagnosed her “existential anxiety” and “acute social anxiety,” enabling Conklin to connect those symptoms to the broader context of social distancing and social media in terms of the loss of “emotional intimacy”; how we see ourselves and treat others; loneliness and mental health issues; distrust of others and institutions; and the loss of community.
Whether you’re a “glass-half-full” type of person or not makes a difference. Darcy’s cup is empty when we meet her. She followed the rules and where did it get her?
Professionally, her life involved actuarial science, making rational and valid predictions. But when her do-everything-with-husband of eight years springs on her he doesn’t love her anymore and has found another woman, Darcy’s response is irrational except to flee to her childhood “safe house” in the hills of the Berkshire Mountains. Only to get hit over the head again to find it empty. Her devoted, indulgent parents have left for retirement in Arizona. Salvation, her insurance company boss who encouraged her to take six months off for Me Time recovery, her job waiting for her, until he changes his mind. The people she trusted most have betrayed her.
Darcy turns into a recluse. How many days of “self-imposed isolation and canned food consumption” (think Chef Boyardee stocked in the Clipper’s house since the 1999 Y2K fears) can Darcy take? Does she break free?
Depends on how you define Freedom. Early on, Darcy believes isolating from the “crappiness of other people” sets her free, freedom seen from a broken personal and social perspective. But soon a larger picture emerges about independence, acceptance, resilience, belonging. Freedom has been on Conklin’s mind since her 2013 debut: slavery in The House Girl and unsupervised children running wild in The Last Romantics, 2019.
Consider how many people live alone these days: 37 million in 2021 according to this account. How many are like Darcy, realizing isolation “breeds paranoia”? The longer-you-stay-off-the-horse the harder it gets playing out. For those of us who quarantined for let’s say two years of the pandemic, we know how reentry into the real world felt. Darcy, though, lets those anxious feelings fester to unhealthy extremes.
Ludicrous as they may be, it’s an effective approach to making statements about powerlessness versus empowerment, inclusiveness, risk-taking, and the costs of spreading lies.
To counteract the downbeat, Conklin makes sure she offers the upbeat suggesting ways to reconnect, such as the human-animal bond and an architectural design concept of building bridges, which expands the physical to emotional and sensory. To the importance of play, in childhood and adulthood. To Nature:
Thought-provoking, a lot of questions and issues are raised. Here’s a sample:
1) “How do you know when one time is the last time?” The grabbing opening line.
2) Do you believe “the way the world is structured, it’s the wives who suffer”?
3) When your life is falling apart, do you have friends or a special one who’s there for you? Or, are your friends like Darcy’s who “lacked the desire to understand”?
4) Do you know how to “Be kind to yourself”? Stand up for yourself? “Stand alone”?
5) Do you believe “everyone has the capacity to change”?
7) Is age the key to wisdom, or something else?
8) Do you believe “free play is the antidote to our times”?
9) Do you believe “everything necessary for life can be accomplished on the internet”?
This, then, is a novel about human connectedness in our personal lives; with our community, including activism; and with Nature. Which is introduced early on when we learn about the history of this New England town’s founding – its indigenous peoples, the Mahican tribe better known as the Mohicans, who ate plants that had hallucinogenic properties. In this case, wild mushrooms. Like all the issues tackled, fungi are in the news. Eating fungi that aren’t poisonous can make you happy seems to be the premise of the town’s peaceful establishment. Note the mushrooms on the cover. (The sad expression on Darcy’s image is deflected by the sight of a parrot on her head! As for the fern, who goes by the name of Fred, and the rest of the images, you’ll find out about them in due time.)
The absence of any quotes in the dialogue (hint: Darcy does end up talking to other people) adds to a sense of flow and connectedness.
Most of what Darcy tells us outside of her first-person narrative is revealed in online messages: emails sent and not, and the infamous community bulletin board. Expect anything and everything to pop up! The message Board’s diversity begins with URGENT, FREE, REMINDER, ALERT, WARNING, HELP, WANTED, SUBSTANTIAL REWARD, MISSING, SAVE, ISO (Internet jargon, In Search OF) and FS (For Sure), along with other missives, such as a string of dreamy poetic prose: “When was the last time you smelled 100 tulips”? One of the secrets in this town.
Conklin also shows us she’s a researcher, using old National Geographic magazines to support what Darcy is going through. From the Friedrich Nietzsche February 1981 issue, she tells us he “loved to be alone” to avoid the “mental anguish of caring.” Other magazine issues feature the “solitude, difficulty, isolation, silence” (Pablo Neruda, 1978); the benefits of risk-taking and adventure (Marco polo, 1988) and the dangers (Michael Clark Rockefeller, 1991); and “stepping outside” of ourselves (Chinyingi footbridge, Zambia, 1997).
Does the message board turn out to be a “godsend” like Darcy’s mother claims it is?
Lorraine