Tiger, Tiger by Margaux Fragoso

The subject matter of Tiger, Tiger is shocking enough — the seduction of a very young girl by a man who has been already imprisoned for the rape of one of his own daughters — but the language that Fragoso uses to describe her sexual encounters will leave the reader wondering who is being served by this memoir.

The book is set in Union City, New Jersey, where Margaux grows up with a mother who suffers from mental illness and a volatile narcissist of a father who is by turns angry or distant with his only child. The child Margaux meets Peter when she sees him playing with some children in a public pool and asks if she can join in. She likes him so much that she asks if she can go to his house to play. Her first glimpse of the inside of Peter’s apartment is of a magic kingdom — a mixture of playground and zoo. One of his exotic pets is a cayman, “part alligator, part crocodile”. She writes that it was “half the size of my arm”. “‘How can he be so tiny?’ I asked. ‘Well, if he was in the wild he’d grow bigger,’ Peter said. ‘But here, in captivity, he grows only to about the size the tank allows… He’s happy there, see, with his little stream and log to sit on: he’ll never really get bigger than he is. Unless I get a bigger tank… But I like him the size he is.’”

I quote this exchange because it is clearly intended as a metaphor for Peter’s relationship with Margaux. He creates a world for her where she receives all the attention that she doesn’t get from her parents, but in return he exercises total control over her mind and body. “Let’s say over the next seven years this man, Peter, reprogrammed this child’s fizzing cells,” Fragoso writes. “He cleverly memorised her pathways to joy and followed her easy trails of desire, her cravings for Creamsicles, going shirtless like a boy, loving the lap of a dog’s sweet pink tongue on her face.”

Fragoso, who has spent four years studying creative writing and has published some poems and short stories, is a writer with a deft turn of phrase, but the fact that she is talented makes this book almost as troubling as its awful subject matter. It is hard to know whether her flat, affectless prose is a stylistic choice or simply the deadened testimony of a survivor. Either way, it pushes the horror onto the reader, who is forced to conjure up all the shame and revulsion that is missing in the text.

One of the most shocking aspects of this book is that the relationship between Margaux and Peter was far from secret; everybody around them, from her parents to Peter’s partner Ines, must have known at some level. Only when there is public outrage — a lifeguard spots Peter kissing 10-year-old Margaux on the lips in a public pool — does the father take action and separate them. But he doesn’t prevent their reunion two years later; indeed, in the only comic scene in the book, he takes Peter and Margaux out for a meal to Benihana, in a sort of sick version of Meet the Parents.

Margaux’s father, a jeweller by trade, is far and away the best-drawn character in Tiger, Tiger, and it is in the scenes with him that you see the writer that Fragoso is capable of being. He is rarely affectionate towards her except when she develops acne, when he spends hours dealing with her pimples under his jeweller’s loupe.

One of the reasons that the father springs to life as a character is that he is given pages of dialogue. The trouble is that many of these conversations take place when Margaux is only eight years old. Fragoso claims that she kept diaries as a child, but unless the young Margaux was wired for sound, it seems impossible to view these chapters as anything more than an imaginative reconstruction. There were several points in the book when I wondered if it was in fact entirely fictional, but the awful banality of the last chapters convinced me otherwise. If she had made it up, she would have given it a better ending — one with a shred of redemption.

Tiger, Tiger’s publishers are heralding it as a literary sensation — the rights have been sold in 20 countries and the book, they say, is one “that has to be talked about”. But in my opinion the only issue it raises is why it is being published in its current form. If you want to read a subtle portrait of the complex relationship between paedophile and victim, then Nabokov’s Lolita has never been bettered (it is interesting that Peter and Margaux read it together, and I would say the shadow of Humbert Humbert looms over Tiger, Tiger). Or you could read the current bestselling novel Room by Emma Donoghue, about the difficulties that victims of abuse have in readjusting to normality after the wicked spell is broken. Both these books are imaginative tours de force; they add to our understanding of the darker side of human nature. All this book does is assault our senses.

Of course we feel desperately sorry for the child Margaux, but is there really any reason for the reader to experience her abuse in such vivid detail, particularly as she doesn’t write about her recovery at all? Who needs to know the exact topography of Peter’s penis, his penchant for frottage or the exact nature of the obstacles that stood in the way of full penetration? I can’t imagine why anyone would want to read this book outside of Fragoso’s therapist, members of her family and the odd paedophile looking for a cheap thrill.

I regret that Fragoso did not use her undoubted talents in a different way. Charles Dickens, after all, turned his childhood misery in the blacking factory into David Copperfield. My worry is that, by writing this book, Fragoso has defined herself as the abuse victim who knows how to write, which she may find a label as hard to shake as her experiences are for this traumatised reader to forget. I was paid to read this book, but there is no amount of money that would persuade me to read it again.