by Nicole Yurcaba
Enigmatic and mysterious, Clytemnestra—also known as Cly—works as a check-in girl at a sibylline New York City hotel called The Gold Persimmon. Cloistered after dropping out of college, Cly lives with her parents—an academic father whose questionable relationship with a student lands him in trouble with the college dean; an unpredictable poet mother who measures her own success and well-being by Cly’s successes and failures. Meanwhile, Cly navigates the strict set of rules she’s established for herself in order to not compromise her position at The Gold Persimmon. However, the random and bold appearance of one of the hotel’s clients changes Cly’s self-expectations and reality. Meanwhile, in an alternate reality, an impenetrable fog overtakes the city where Jaime, a young nonbinary writer, finds themself trapped in a sex hotel with six other people. One by one the survivors turn on one another, and Jaime enters into a Lord of the Flies-like battle for survival.
Experimental and exploratory, The Gold Persimmon takes readers into the depths of personal shame, familial disappointment, and psychological horror. What readers will immediately notice is its focus on sexuality, specifically the female and nonbinary experience. Most noteworthy about the novel is Cly, a character with whom many millennial and Gen Z readers may identify. In Cly, readers see a young woman struggling to navigate the consequences of her personal and professional choices as well as the sudden, immediate attraction she feels towards Edith, a client at The Gold Persimmon. Interestingly enough, Cly’s relationship with Edith is challenging on another front: though Edith pursues a relationship with Cly, Edith is also married—to a man, thus challenging the traditional narratives about monogamy. Readers sense that Cly isn’t ashamed or embarrassed at her attraction to another woman; instead, it’s her acknowledgement of an attraction to a client, which transgresses Cly’s professional standards; she’s also upset at the fact that Edith is married. Cly, too, also carries a dark secret: she is perpetually fascinated by the death of one of the hotel’s past clients—a man who leapt from one of The Gold Persimmon’s windows and landed on a parked car. Cly continually replays the images of the man’s suicide in her mind, which leads her to understand why Edith is a client at the hotel.
At certain points, readers are drenched with the toxicity oozing from Cly and Edith’s relationship. Edith is overbearing, controlling. Her actions bear a striking, perhaps unfortunate, resemblance in personality and actions to My Dark Vanessa’s Jacob Strane, a novel with which The Gold Persimmon shares some parallels: confused narrators not living life to its fullest and embracing or utilizing their strengths and abilities; a strong, female lead who is kept and captured by an older, more dominant partner; characters bound by society’s conventions, standards, and binaries.
Part II unfolds cinematically, like scenes from Peter Greenaway’s The Cook, The Thief, His Wife, Her Lover. In this section, Merbaum’s writing turns from the imagistic, the nearly poetic, to dialogue-driven, as well as first-person, thus making Jaime’s story a more intimate one than Cly’s. Ruth and Calle, a lesbian couple (one partner is married and has a son, again challenging traditional narratives about monogamy), attempt to divert themselves and their relationship from disaster. Calle embarks on a mental and emotional breakdown, and readers see her strapped to a stretcher-like bed by the hotel’s questionable security guard, Jason. Jaime, Adrienne, Ruth, and Zosiah participate in a gut-bloating debauchery of duck eggs, wine, cheese, and a variety of other foods. Jaime assesses and self-reflects about their own identity and abilities as chaos unfolds around them. At this point, the novel becomes an anthropological study in how the animalistic survival instinct humans so often forget they possess or deny they have takes over.
What readers will also notice about The Gold Persimmon is its commentary about loneliness: the social conventions and boundaries that create and perpetuate loneliness; an individual’s definition of loneliness; the efforts an individual goes to in order to feel a sense of belonging and overcome their own loneliness. The characters in The Gold Persimmon carry their own loneliness, and at one point Cly reflects: “How many people are truly alone? With no one at all who cares for them, no one who depends on their work, their money? Loneliness is not a lack of people and things to occupy one’s life; it’s a lack of connection with those things.” In Part II, readers can even interpret the descent of the impenetrable cloud as representative of the kind of loneliness that weighs down its bearers and shrouds them from ever seeing beyond its boundaries.
Overall, The Gold Persimmon encourages readers to look beyond the happenings and events they may perceive as ends and instead utilize them as new, much needed beginnings. Ultimately, the power and charm of The Gold Persimmon is that readers can take from it what they want. Should readers want a horror story, they have it. Should they desire a more serious work that embraces non-convention and experimentation on all levels, they have that as well. More significantly, readers seeking a challenge to the heterosexual, cis-gendered characters appearing in much of mainstream literature find their heroines in these pages. The Gold Persimmon is atmospheric, ethereal, a spell well-cast. Merbaum’s writing is tight, elegantly detailed, and captures the most vulnerable parts of not only the human soul, but also of everyday existence.
Nicole Yurcaba (Ukrainian: Нікола Юрцаба) is a Ukrainian-American poet and essayist. Her poems and essays have appeared in The Atlanta Review, The Lindenwood Review, Whiskey Island, Raven Chronicles, Appalachian Heritage, North of Oxford, and many other online and print journals. Nicole holds an MFA in Writing from Lindenwood University, is the recipient of a July 2020 Writing Residency at Gullkistan, Creative Center for the Arts in Iceland, and is a Tupelo Press June 2020 30 for 30 featured poet. Her poetry collection Triskaidekaphobia is forthcoming Black Spring Group in 2022. She teaches poetry workshops for Southern New Hampshire University and works as a career counselor for Blue Ridge Community College.
