Paper Cuts: The Marigold

“This is the future,” says Stan Marigold, son and heir of real estate mogul and murder cultist Albert Marigold, builder of the luxury apartment tower from which Andrew F. Sullivan’s novel takes its names, watching a fungal gestalt consciousness consume Toronto. “Imagine owning it.” As the world collapses around him, first institutionally and then physically, Stan continues to repeat things like, “imagine controlling it” and “we own it” and “it’s ours”. As it becomes increasingly apparent that what he’s saying lacks any connection at all to reality, the last flimsy shred of romance clinging like dead skin to the scaly bulk of big business finally comes loose and blows away. He doesn’t have grand ambitions. None of these people do, these developers planting the bodies of the homeless and desperate in the foundations of their towers as bloody offerings to the earth, plotting in smoke-filled rooms where they don white robes and mumble ritual phrases like children playing pretend. What they have is a single small, tepid, and greedy thoughts they apply with leaden stupidity to every single thing they see, and the thought is: that’s mine. A restaurant? Mine. A woman’s life? Mine. The dead returned to life, their minds swirled together to destroy the idea of loneliness itself? Mine, mine, mine.

That Sullivan arms himself with such fantastically stupid antagonists and still manages to excavate not just the trivial humanity remaining in their degraded psyches but also dramatic tension, suspense, and intrigue from them is no mean feat. Take a scene in which Stan sits eating alone in a secret invitation-only restaurant in one of his buildings, pondering how to manufacture a new identity for it, a new kind of exclusivity, a new veneer that will make it desirable instead of a millstone around his neck. Sullivan weaves deftly in and out of the minutiae of restaurant supply, manufactured scarcity, fads, and the endless shell game of profitability while also probing at Stan’s neuroses and essential unhappiness. His elites regard themselves with the same nervous, limited possessiveness with which they approach everything else, worrying at their own weak points, trying to exercise mastery over themselves in a way that leaves their psyches adrift in the dark and jumping at shadows. They live in a world as fake and empty as the Marigold itself, full of rooms that will never be lived in, erected by people who don’t care for a public that doesn’t want it. A monument to nothingness.

It’s Sullivan’s working-class people who give his vision of Toronto the small, strangled measure of heart it retains. A disabled ex hockey player hooked on painkillers and making feeble attempts at reconnecting with his daughter. A young RideShare driver buried under a mountain of coercive debt and the accelerating pace of his father’s mental collapse. A young girl unable to let the one moment of sweetness she’s felt in her life slip away, even in the face of madness and world-ending calamity. A lesbian public safety employee staring at this thing, evocatively named “the Wet”, devouring the city from the.foundations up. Sullivan conjures a physically painful sense of economic desperation, a feeling familiar to anyone who’s ever lain awake at night fixating on where rent is coming from, on how to afford groceries, on whether to see a doctor or go to work to avoid getting fired. Even degraded and crushed down, their humanity shines through. Even in the face of annihilation, they have visions of the world beyond ownership, beyond control. If all that’s left in the shadow of the Wet, a seething, amorphous metaphor for the final liquidation of a hollowed-out culture, is a choice of deaths, at least these people know how to see, how to love, how to grieve. At least they’re human, if only for a little while.